M. Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

Cafe Society
1

In this other thread, rackensack recommended The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov for its satanic mayhem. I have now read the book and I hope I can get rackensack, Uke and maybe some others in here to talk about it. (Yeah, I know this thread will be a real humdinger of excitement for the TM, but I just can’t control myself here–the book is really terrific.)

The book has at least 3 parts (interspersed): 1. What happens in 1930s Moscow when satan and his entourage come to town; 2. Pontius Pilate’s story; and 3. the story of the Master and Margarita.

The Moscow story is a very funny and biting black satire of spies, asylums, the quest for a decent apartment, currency hoarding and disappeared persons. I am surprised that any of this could have been published in Russia, even in censored form. I also wonder whether it will still make sense in 20-30 years when people begin to forget the fate of writers in 20th century Russia.

The Pontius Pilate story is like something Bulgakov saw whole-cloth in a dream or vision–its completeness, detail and psychological understanding are intense, and it is written in a style entirely different from the other parts of the book.

The story of the Master (the book’s author of the Pontius Pilate story) and Margarita (his lover) is the most sketchy and seemingly unrealized (I’d love to be disabused of this idea since despite this Bulgakov chose this story as the title for the book). Are we supposed to like Margarita? She is the type figure who supports the artist and appreciates his work more than he does himself–and as such is only derivative, living her life through another’s work. In her encounter with Woland, she is made to seem admirable for persevering, for refusing to ask (pray) for anything and for seeking mercy for others (who perhaps do not deserve mercy–or is the point that everyone deserves mercy?).

Anyway, aside from the high comedic values in the first story of cats with guns (was he or wasn’t he a crack shot?), the universal dissing of choirmasters, literary societies and bad poetry and petty bureaucracy undermined by forces of actual darkness, here are some of the things I liked about the book.

  1. There are references to nearly every prior portrayal of satan, as well as to the great Russian writers of the 19th century. I saw several possible references to The Idiot, Dostoyevsky’s novel of what would happen to Jesus if he came to Russia (BTW, was The Idiot the basis for the movie “The Ruling Class”?). The book is extremely Russian, with gobs of characters, absurdities and mysticism.

  2. No one is a hero–every human character is self-righteous and gets proper comeuppance. The possible exceptions are the Master and Margarita–Margarita acknowledges her wrongdoing (adultery) and makes no claim on the world for anything (she is however disappointed when she proudly prepares to leave satan’s ball without any reward). And only the Master seems to lack veniality (he conveniently won the lottery and so was able to have a nice flat and time to write his book–but even he is disappointed the world does not want his novel).

  3. I’m not sure what the ultimate point of the book is on a spiritual level–yeah, I know things aren’t always supposed to wrap up tightly in neat packages–but Bulgakov’s idea of evil is very interesting, if not complete. Satan (ignoring the entourage for a moment) deals out justice–it’s almost as if he is a force of nature, carefully paying out measure for measure the appalling or petty evil created by people. Mercy in some way appears to be an abbreviated answer. (The entourage is chaos itself, but controlled by satan’s “force of nature” quality.)

Well, that’s enough. The book is a sprawling hodgepodge of fantasy, comedy and vision. Thank you rackensack for an excellent recommendation.

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Glad you enjoyed it so much. It is one of my favorites, the more so since I first read it at a time and place when I really needed something like it to to dig into. Just before my senior year of high school, my family had moved from Fayetteville, Arkansas, which (though still in Arkansas, with all that entails) was at least the seat of the University of Arkansas, and hence had a somewhat more active intellectual and cultural life than other places in Arkansas, to a small town in the eastern Arkansas delta region, a few miles from Jonesboro. I browsed the shelves of the Poinsett County Public Library for what seemed like forever without finding anything of interest I hadn’t already read, until I stumbled across The Master and Margarita. The dust jacket copy sucked me right in, and the book was even better than I had any right to expect. What it was doing there I have no idea (it’d been checked out only one other time since being acquired sometime in the late 1960s – this was in 1981). I still regard that as one of the two or three best things that happened to me there before I left for college, and quite possibly the best of them all.

I have to go fix dinner for the wife and kids, so I don’t have time at the moment to apply myself to your excellent comments and questions; I’ll try to do so before bed this evening.

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I have read this twice.
I had a russian friend recomend it.

I loved Behemoth the cat.

If you have not I strongly suggest reading Bulgakov’s “Heart of a dog” That is my favorite by this author.

Master and Margarita ranks oh I say 3rd or 4th in my favorite Russian/Soviet literature.

Since your gonna ask here they are:

“Heart of a dog” Bulgakov
“Deas Souls” Gogol
“Master and Margarita” Bulgakov
“life of a useless man” Gorky
“Sebastpol sketches” Tolstoy

Glad to hear someone else has enjoyed this classic.

Although it does lose quite a bit in translation.

Serious though, read “heart of a dog” is a wonderful satire.

Osip

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Read it in French after a friend forgot it at my place. Interesting, more so because it was a “restored” version. All the places that were censored were put into brackets. Sometime you just had to wonder why the stuff was cut in the first place.

5

I love this book and would recommend it to anyone.

My favorite part is the first part - Satan hits 1930’s Russia and dispenses a big round of comeuppance. I love the ridiculouslness of the Writer’s union. I love that Bulgakov, like Dante, gets to punish all the people and institutions he doesn’t like. I love the wicked subversiveness of it. I LOVE Behemoth. The Pontius Pilate story is beautiful. The Master and Margarita portion is the least realized, partially because (IIRC) the book was left unfinished.

I need to find Heart of a Dog.

If I can plug Czech literature to any of you slavophiles, let me recommend “The Engineer of Human Souls” by Josef Skvorecky.

That is all.

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Yeah, please tell me something about Heart of a Dog (great title), and about The Engineer of Human Souls too while you’re at it. Neither of those titles could have come from anywhere except eastern Europe–they’ve just got this preoccupation with heart and soul. I feel that I may be due for another Russian period–I mean, I’m not depressed, I don’t need to impose time limits on my reading and paranoia levels are normal–I think I could take it now.

I still have my copy of the book with me, and the notes say that Bulgakov finished The Master and Margarita in 1938. He then promptly went blind. This is an interesting parallel to Milton, also blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, one of the satanic archetypes. Pontius Pilate also seems blind at the end of the book when he is released, and one of Woland’s minions removes his dark glasses to kill with a glance. Neato!

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magdalene: I agree that the story of the Master and Margarita isn’t as strong as the other parts of the book, but I don’t think it’s because it was unfinished. Bulgakov was still editing the book, but had stopped working on it some time before his death, being in very ill health and knowing that it was unlikely to be published under Stalin --probably knowing that it wouldn’t be published during his life (his father had died of the same disease, also at a fairly young age, and Bulgakov was trained as a physician). I just think that the sort of hope and optimism that he wanted to feel was pretty much sapped out of him by the time the book was underway; as much as he might have wanted to believe that manuscripts don’t burn, he probably died believing that such would be the fate of his book.

Hope and optimism is a perilously difficult thing for any writer to attempt, and Bulgakov succeeds no better than most would have at avoiding sententiousness and even conventional sentimentality at times. And let’s face it – God’s grace, freely given as a blessing, and not earned through merit (indeed, not susceptible to or influenced at all by merit) is a lot less interesting than achieving a reward through striving and overcoming obstacles (e.g., Margarita at Satan’s ball). Yet in the Christian theology that informs the novel, it is grace that must be the source of salvation – no one deserves it, yet it is given to some. Theologically sound, but it doesn’t make nearly so compelling a story as heads being severed by tram cars and rolling down the street, or naked flying female vampires and witches.

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Josef Skvorecky, author of Engineer of Human Souls, has lived through literally every government that Czechoslovakia had - post WWI independence, occupation by the Third Reich, The Stalinist 50s, the Prague Spring of 1968…when he left and settled with his wife in Canada. His wife runs a Czech language publishing house there. His first novel, The Cowards, was banned in the 1950s. It’s the coming-of-age story of Danny Smiricky, a jazz-playing, skirt-chasing, wise-cracking kid who just happens to be coming of age during the German occupation. Skvorecky also wrote a bunch of detective stories about Lt. Boruvka (translates as Lt. Blueberry) that are a fun read if you can find them.

The Engineer of Human Souls picks up the story of Danny Smiricky when he is in his 40s. He is a college literature professor in Canada. The novel is both a reminiscence of his growing-up years during WWII (goes over the same period as The Cowards, you don’t need to have read The Cowards to appreciate it); an emotional and political history of his country (detailed through the oft-hilarious letters of his friends and the conversations of his fellow Czech expatriates in Canada); a reflection on literature and culture - each chapter is named after the author he is discussing in his class, e.g. Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Conrad, Lovecraft; a discussion about how people who grow up in free countries do not understand the true evils of totalitarianism…

It is a human, tragicomic book that combines poop humor with some of the best writing on literature, love, war, death, fear, life, politics, sex, aging, music, and history that I have ever read. The title comes from Josef Stalin, who called the writer “the engineer of human souls.” Skvorecky is throwing this definition back in his face with great relish. Can’t recommend it enough.

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.

Unlike Osip, I consider Heart of a Dog much more limited than The Master and Margarita. Within its scope, however, it’s quite a successful satire. Indeed, it’s much more a pure satire than M&M.

The title is also somewhat disingenuous, though literal. Essentially, the notion is that a savage but injured street dog is taken in by a doctor, who transplants the pituitary glands and testicles from a human being into him, causing him to become a human, or at least a human of sorts. The more you know about the Bolshevik Revolution and the years immediately following (Heart of a Dog was published in 1925, IIRC) the funnier (and sadder) the book will be. The more sypmathetic you are to the Bolshevik Revolution, the less you’ll like the book – Bulgakov was unapologetically aristocratic, and one can read the book as suggesting some unpleasant things about the Russian proletariat if you consider the dog to be the Russian people and the transplanted organs as the Bolshevik leadership. It’s no surprise that its publication pretty much ended his publishing career in the Soviet Union, though he continued to write for the stage until just a few years before his death in 1940.

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Could you expand on which parts you think are supposed to be hopeful and optimistic? You reference Bulgakov’s book–are you saying that an author resigning himself to pleasing God with his work even if the world never sees it is a hopeful state (I’m really asking–maybe it is)? Me, I’ve always found the radical Calvinistic position that grace is not connected to works to be depressing–acknowledging that everyone is a sinner and cannot “earn” salvation is different from saying that people will be treated randomly regardless of their efforts. And who is the god in this formula of Bulgakov’s–Woland or the god served by Matthew the Levite?

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Thanks Racknsack.
You bout covered it. I thought it was a great satire and a good read. Did I ever mention my Jack Russel terrier is named Sharik the dog from this story?

Humble if your trying to dodge excessively depressing books. Then I withdrawl my suggestion of “life of a useless man” THAT is a depressing book. The kind of book that makes you consider taking a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey out for a walk in a field.

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Well, hope and optimism might not have been the ideal words to choose. Let me try it a different way. Bulgakov’s got all these devastating satirical episodes that demolish practically everything about Soviet society in the late 20s. He’s got free play to make up outlandish characters with fanstastic powers, and he obviously took great relish in doing so. On the other hand, he’s got the Master and Margarita. What virtue there is in the book is pretty much concentrated in them (and in Margarita’s maid, but she’s a minor figure). Bulgakov could have chosen to have only the book, only the Master, only Margarita, or some combination of them (but not all), survive. He chose to have all of them survive (at least in a sense), though none of them are left intact in Moscow, or, indeed, on earth. But it’s difficult to make virtue as interesting as evil, chaos, revenge, etc., and so while Bulgakov’s got the virtuous characters on his hands throughout, they almost inevitably seem less fully realized than Woland and his retinue – or even than the petty and venal Muscovites upon whom Woland et cie practice. The Master seems to be a cariacature of Bulgakov, with all of his negative traits amplified, but however despairing he is, he goes on. Bulgakov, too, soldiered on, even more assiduously than the Master, writing and adapting for the Moscow Art Theater, writing to the authortities and ultimately to Stalin in attempts to obtain permission to work and to publish, until he recognized in himself the symptoms of the kidney disease that had killed his father at a relatively young age. By then, the only form of hope he seems to have been able to muster was hope for some sort of posthumous redemption – perhaps even with a wish for a merciful hastening of physical death – such as the resolution he accords to the Master and Margarita in the novel.

As for your last question, I think it’s telling that what Woland rewards, consistently, is compassion, even to the undeserving. He metes out plenty of retribution, to be sure, but he also seems to have more power over the fate of the nominally virtuous than is quite consistent with traditional conceptions of Satan.

BTW, I’m sorry it took so long to get back to this; we’ve had houseguests since last week and my online time has been severely circumscribed.

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It may even be a bit better than this, since it’s not just any posthumous recognition. Jesus apparently reads and approves the novel–how would you like to have that for a book blurb? “A gripping tale you won’t be able to put down–the Almighty God.” That would sure show the Literary Guild.

**

Jesus has to beg Woland to have mercy on them because they are only “nominally” virtuous–“they can’t go to the light because they didn’t earn it,” to paraphrase, but they can still have death without torment. This concept is very unorthodox, to say the least, but I’ve got this nagging idea that I’ve heard it somewhere else too (I mean the idea that satan is the world’s natural ruler and that god’s mercy is what is abnormal for the world). Maybe it’s reminding me of the virtuous pagans in the nice part of Dante’s Inferno.

Osip: it’s not that I avoid depressing Russian novels at all costs–it’s just that I want to read them in bright sunlight in busy places.:slight_smile: