Review: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

A look back at the 1966 Russian classic

Russian writer Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov began writing his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita , around 1928, dictating the final updates to his wife days before his death in 1940. This was the era of Stalin and his purges, and the story goes that since Bulgakov was a favourite, he was allowed to live, but his work didn’t necessarily reach the public, at least not his “subversive” writing. The novel never got published in his lifetime, until the magazine Moskva printed a hugely censored version in two parts in 1966 and 1967.

The layered satire begins one hot spring during which the Devil himself visits Moscow with his cronies, two disfigured henchmen, a seductress named Hella and a giant cat who loves vodka, chess and guns. Claiming that he is a foreign ‘artiste’ with powers in black magic, the Devil, or Woland, as Bulgakov calls him, proceeds to expose via several seances the dark side of socialist Russia. The epigraph from Goethe’s Faust sets it up nicely: “...who are you then?’/ “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

Jesus’ existence

Woland appears to Berlioze, a literary magazine editor, and Ivan, a poet, as they are discussing whether Jesus was real or fictitious. The Devil is perturbed about their atheism and the “belief that humans determine their own fate.” He goes on to give them proof of Jesus’ existence, also predicting the exact manner in which Berlioze will die. Woland’s “evil” and the menacing disappearances of various characters inevitably draw parallels with what was happening in Soviet society at the time. But isn’t Woland also a force of good? Doesn’t he orchestrate the reunion of the novel’s central characters, the unnamed novelist — the Master — whose manuscript has been denied publication, and Margarita, his married lover?

Manuscripts don’t burn

Woland admonishes the Master when he learns that the novel he wrote was about Pontius Pilate: “Couldn’t you have found another subject? Let me see it.” The Master says he has burnt it in the stove, to which the Devil retorts: “...that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.” In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Richard Pevear lauds the novel’s “formal originality” and “its devastating satire of Soviet life” as also the fact that it “breathed an air of freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia.”

Pevear highlights the complex nature of this freedom — Bulgakov, had during a moment of fear early into the writing, burnt what he had written, but the manuscript refused to stay burnt as its publication shows. This leads us to the other oft-quoted line from the book: “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”

In a divided world, there’s a lesson in Bulgakov’s act of writing, and with such candour. As Woland says: “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?”

The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.