Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)
In several ways, Bulgakov resembles Anton Chekhov. He was a physician, having finished the Medical School in his native Kiev in 1916. He was a playwright, and during his most fruitful years in the theater he was associated with Chekhov’s old house, the Moscow Art Theater. He could provoke laughter as handily as Chekhov, though his humor had far more satirical bite to it, and he wrote a quantity of short stories. And like Chekhov, he eventually gave up medical practice for the life of a writer.
His great difference from Chekhov is that he wrote novels. The Master and Margarita, the first chapter of which follows, belongs next to Bely’s Petersburg (see p. 79) and Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago (see p. 153) as one of the supreme masterpieces in modern Russian letters.
Asked to identify Bulgakov, a contemporary would have answered that he was a playwright, author of The Days of the Turbins (1926) and a perennially popular stage adaptation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1932). Audiences knew him also for such satirical comedies as Zoika’s Apartment and The Crimson Island. After 1927, none of his works were printed during his lifetime. Not even the standard western histories of Soviet literature were aware of Bulgakov as being someone other than the interesting literary craftsman of certain plays and short fiction.
Then, in 1966-6734, there appeared The Master and Margarita, the germ of which had first occupied Bulgakov in the 1920s. It accompanied him through his creative life and absorbed the supreme effort of his imagination in its many evolving forms. When he diagnosed his own progressive illness and calculated with icy accuracy the exact amount of time remaining in his life, he put aside all else and completed the manuscript. He had the pages bound, knowing that no Soviet publisher would ever do so. Blind toward the end, he dictated the epilogue to his wife and had it pasted into the bound manuscript. For over a quarter of a century after his death, this summit of his artistic achievement lay in total obscurity.
Like the novels of Bely and Pasternak, The Master and Margarita is a work of philosophical and ethical rumination, but it exceeds both of them in scope (they seem almost local beside its cosmic range) and in metaphysical and religious depth. For headlong somersaults of fantastic illusion and breathtaking dislocations of narrative it simply has no competitors. To summarize it is impossible. To exemplify it in a brief passage is extremely difficult. But I am happy to follow the lead of Ellendea Proffer, author of numerous studies of Bulgakov, who observes that the opening chapter contains most of the fundamental themes of the book.
All of the three broad categories into which the narrative falls are present in the personalities and events of chapter one: the satirical picture of official Moscow literary life (Berlioz); Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Jesus Christ (the hack poet Ivan Bezdomny has written a poem about Jesus); and the fantastic story of the nameless writer known as the Master (Bezdomny will be a disciple) and his love Margarita.
It is the Devil himself who holds everything together, and did so from the start: among the working titles in the 1920s were The Black Magician and The Consultant with a Hoof. He is the mysterious “foreigner” of the first chapter. Only the initial of his name, Woland, appears here, and we get only a glimpse of his power: he provides precise hints as to the manner of the untidy death that Berlioz will meet in a few pages, he settles the question being disputed by declaring that the historical existence of Jesus is not to be doubted, and the last words of the chapter, spoken by the Devil, are precisely those that open the second chapter, which is the beginning of the story of Pilate’s encounter with Christ.