Margarita's Moonlight ride
“Who art thou, then?” “Part of the Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good” Goethe – Faust (Bulgakov, Ginsburg translation 1).
“Bulgakov began The Master and Margarita in 1928, and though he destroyed the first version in 1930, it occupied his mind until the very last moments of his life” (Natov 92).
“The Master enters Ivan’s hospital ward encouraged by Ivan’s friendly attitude, and the two immediately reach a mutual understanding. When Ivan asks why his visitor does not escape since he has the keys to the balcony grills, the visitor replies that he has nowhere to go, which is the ultimate stage of man’s loneliness and despair. He also has given up his name, like everything else in life” (Natov 100).
“Love caught us like a murderer jumping out of a dark alley” (Bulgakov Enter the Hero).
After the Master finishes his novel and hands it over to the editor he finds the Soviet literary world less than receptive to him and his novel. “Soon the critic Latunsky and Ahriman and a certain writer Mstislav Lavrovich viciously accuse him of propagating religiosity and ‘Pilatism.’ The Master’s story summarizes Bulgakov’s own painful experience: Orlinky’s famous article “Against Bulgakovism” and the vicious slander campaign headed by Averbach (Ahriman), Blium, Litovsky and others, after the performance of The Days of the Turbins and the preparation of Flight. Vsevolod Vishnevsky is the prototype of Mstislav Lavrovich. The dramatic scene in which the Master burns his novel replicates Bulgakov’s own burning of his novel about the devil in March 1930” (Natov 101).
“‘I am incurable,’ the Master responds to Ivan’s suggestion he might recover. Once again the Master’s story parallels Bulgakov’s: through his hero Bulgakov confirmed his recognition that his disease is terminal. The motif of bidding farewell to life accompanies the Master. After his arrest, the Master did not write Margarita for fear of exposing her to the hardships of his maimed existence. And now he has found the moral strength to renounce the joy of meeting Margarita again” (Natov 101).
“I don’t want you to perish here with me,” (Bulgakov Enter the Hero).
“During his last months of life, the Master talks only to Ivan. Before his final disappearance the Master’s shade comes to bid farewell to the former poet, now called Ivanushka, like the Russian fairytale hero, and ask him to write the continuation of the Master’s novel. ‘Farewell, my disciple!’ are the Master’s last words said to a living being. A few moments later, the nurse tells Ivan that his nameless neighbor from ward 118 has just died” (Natov 101, 102).
“Nothing can prevent the human mind from escaping the banality of everyday life into the realm of the supernatural. Man’s search for truth and justice never ceases, although it sometimes takes unusual forms. The Master and Margarita, and late Ivan, escape their suffering through contact with the supernatural—at first demonic, then metaphysical—and reach the sphere of spiritual knowledge” (Natov 108).
“After the extraordinary flowering of literature in a great variety of forms in the post-revolutionary decade, the end of the New Economic Policy and the introduction of the Five Year Plans of the late 1920s brought about a tightening of the reigns in literature and the arts as well. The party’s instrument of pressure and coercion at that time was RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) under the leadership of the narrow and intolerant zealot Leopold Averbakh. And the persecution and pressures applied to writers to force them into the requisite mold succeeded in destroying all but a very small minority which resisted to the end. Many of the most famous authors became silent or almost silent, either by their own choice, or because their works were barred from publication. The former included Isaac Babel and Olesha. The latter included Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Pilnyak. Some, like Pilnyak, were unable to withstand the pressure and broke down, rewriting their works according to the demands of the party critics and censors. Others, like Zamyatin and Bulgakov, refused to submit” (Bulgakov, Ginsburg translation v-vi).
“In 1930, after the censors rejected his play, The Cabal of the Hypocrites (Moliere), Bulgakov, ill and despairing, sent a long and remarkably courageous letter to Stalin. He pointed out that none of his writing was being published, and none of his plays produced. He wrote that in the ten years of his literary activity, 300 ‘reviews’ of his work had appeared in the press, of which three were favorable, 298 hostile and abusive. The entire Soviet press and the agencies in control of repertory had throughout the years ‘unanimously and with extraordinary ferocity argued that Bulgakov’s work cannot exist in the USSR. And I declare,’ he wrote, ‘that the Soviet press is entirely right’ “(Bulgakov, Ginsburg translation vii-viii).
“Many of Bulgakov’s works were published in censored form or only outside the USSR. Such editions are clearly indicated in the entries, as are corrupt texts whether printed abroad or in the Soviet Union. This especially important for The Master and Margarita, since three different texts have been published to date” (Proffer, An International Bibliography 9).
“Sometime towards the end of Bulgakov’s life his neighbor Gabrilovich had asked what he was writing.’ Oh, I’m writing something,’ he had answered, ‘just a trivial little thing.’ This ‘little thing’ had developed over twelve years and had involved an enormous amount of research, which included the history of ancient Rome and early Christianity. Many of the books which were probably familiar to Bulgakov from his childhood in the family of a professor of theology must have been reread and studied. Eight separate versions [of The Master and Margarita] had been produced” (Wright 258).
“At the most general level The Master and Margarita is concerned with the conflict of the spiritual and material world of everyday – a theme that, in one form or another, underlies the whole of Bulgakov. Man, in society, prefers to rely on himself and thinks he can ignore spiritual issues. ‘But what troubles me,’ Woland says to Ivan Homeless in the first, essential conversation with him and editor Berlioz, ‘is this: if there is no God, then, you might ask, who governs the life of men and, generally, the entire situation here on earth? ‘Man himself governs it,’ Homeless replies (pp. 10-11). The whole book is a demonstration of the fact that man does not govern the world - although he usually thinks he does. The trouble is that man is mortal, even – as Woland puts it – ‘suddenly mortal,’ unable to guarantee his own next day , which is demonstrated by Berlioz’ dramatic death by decapitation under a tram, as Woland has foreseen” (Wright 261).
“The heroes of this novel are those who are aware of more than trivial and temporary issues” (Wright 262).
“The third major hero in Moscow is Ivan Homeless, who after giving up writing bad verses gains realization of the importance of the world beyond that of everyday reality, and finally becomes a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy. Several critics have seen in him the simple, ordinary man comparable to the ‘Foolish Ivanushka’ of Russian folk-tales, and we may too be reminded, on a more serious level, of Sancho Panza and his receptiveness to Don Quixote’s ideals. It is indeed in Ivan that Bulgakov’s optimism shows most clearly. Not outstanding, not naturally courageous, he none the less becomes the Master’s ‘disciple,’ and the ‘recorder’ of his story in the same way as Matthew Levi is that of Christ’s… All in all, Ivan is the personification of man’s susceptibility to spiritual truth. (Wright 268-269).
“Behind The Master and Margarita there lies a very straightforward attitude, an optimistic insistence on the power of the spiritual in human life and on the individuality of man. Unavoidably in this framework there is a deep concern for ethical problems. But as Ewa Thmpson points out, Bulgakov ‘is a moralist but not a sermonist: he does not preach virtuous life, and whenever we seek to make him lead a roman a these argument he turns out to be inconsistent.’ Unthinking people may wish to create a hell on earth, but beyond the earth is eternity and immortality for those who desire to achieve it” (Wright 273).
The Master’s background is brief and concise at most. “His romance with Margarita told so movingly but concisely to Ivan, provides very little information about him as a person. By the time Ivan meets him, the Master is a broken man, a burnt-out case, a man who has had the life scared out of him. He pointedly denies that it was prison alone that did this, and says that his fear came before his apparent arrest” (Proffer 560).
“In the late 1920s… RAPP critics specifically took aim at those writers who seemed to continue the traditions of the nineteenth century, who tried to show a link between pre- and post-revolutionary Russia” (Proffer 564).
“We do the novel a disservice if, as some critics are inclined to do, we see it as little more than an allegory of Stalinist Russia, though there are certainly many real-life sources for the characters and events in the novel. Bulgakov had a much greater ambition, namely to put the cataclysmic events of his life, the Russian Revolution, and the rule of Stalin, in historical perspective, and to reaffirm the connection of post-revolutionary Russian literature to the great traditions of the nineteenth century. To be sure the rascals and the soulless bureaucrats of the nineteenth-century works by Gogol, Saltykov and Sukhovo-Kobylin are here in their twentieth-century incarnations, a theme Bulgakov sounded in his earliest works, but so are the intellectuals” (Proffer 564-565).
“For all his criticism of his class, Bulgakov was proud of being a member of the intelligentsia and refused to consider its values outdated and inapplicable in the brave new world of Stalin’s Short Course” (Proffer 565).
“The point of the Master’s novel is also the point of Bulgakov’s novel: there exists moral absolutes, concepts which are unaffected by revolutions tyrannies, and one ignores them at one’s peril… His focus is on those who know better, those who hear the voice of conscience but stifle it in the name of political expendiency” (Proffer 565).
Works Cited:
Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. Grove Press: New York, 1995.
Bulgakov, Mikhail. White Guard. Trans. Marian Schwartz. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2008.
Natov, Nadine. Mikhail Bulgakov. Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1985
Proffer, Ellendea. Bulgakov: Life and Work. Ardis: Ann Arbor, MI, 1984.
Proffer, Ellendea. An International Bibliography Of Works By And About Mikhail Bulgakov. Ardis: Ann Arbor, MI, 1976.
Wright, A. Colin. Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1978.
Matteo Scalera's work inspired by The Master and Margarita
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