The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

novel he footnoted sources for the scenes describing Yeshua’s arrest, Pontius Pilate’s migraine and political cowardice, the machinations of the High Priests, the anguish of Judas, and the stations of the Cross from the perspective of a tormented disciple. Of course, in the official judgment of atheistic Moscow in the 1930s, these New Testament chapters would have to be declared a “fiction.” Inside the chapters, however, we would expect to find some evidence, intona-tional or visual, of the miracles that animated the disciples and sustained their faith. This is not the case. Regardless of who relates the crucifixion – and

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the installments are respectively related orally by the Devil, dreamt by a Muscovite poet, and read silently by Margarita as part of the Master’s novel – all narrators are identical in their sobriety, authority, majestic high-Realist secular style, and compassionate psychological detail with no trace of miracle. The Jerusalem chapters are clearly all the same book – the Master’s novel – regardless of who delivers it, or when, or how. Such a confluence of realistic diction in all segments of this inserted drama, whether uttered, dreamt, or read silently to oneself, lends an aura of pre-verbal authenticity to Christ’s Passion. It also suggests a conviction dear to the Symbolist era: that the true artist has an intuitive perception of Truth, superseding eyewitness accounts left us in the Gospels. The realness of such a vision is not dependent on any local narrative conventions or approximations.

Thus we might say that the boldest “estrangement from reality” in The Master and Margarita is not the magic – that is, not the fact that black cats can walk upright and talk, that Margarita becomes a witch and flies around on a broomstick, that Woland dispatches a drunken theatre bureaucrat to Yalta in five seconds, or that Muscovites turn up in the marsh of a Siberian river with dancing mermaids at full moon. Such character types and episodes are completely routine and rule-abiding within the conventions of the genre from which they come: a Ukrainian folk tale as Gogol might write it up, or a Faust drama. The jolt comes when the reader realizes that the “illusion of reality” in those supremely realistic Jerusalem chapters has not been designed to “feel or look real” according to the usual fictional contract, where readers suspend their disbelief in order to enter into the fictive world. Those chapters simply are real. Or rather, they are as close as a work of verbal art can come to that condition, construed as a window on to an unconstructed prior fact. The names of people and places in the Jerusalem chapters are not the familiar canonized names of the Gospel accounts but what people and places were called back then, in their own time. They are not aware of their own symbolic significance. These scenes do not know that they are being read.

At one point the Master, terrified he will be arrested for the crime of writing about Jesus in an atheist state, burns his novel. Woland hands the book back to its author intact with the comment that “manuscripts don’t burn.” But why a manuscript doesn’t burn is of key importance. It is not only because the Prince of Darkness is there to retrieve it from the flames, his natural element and thus under his control, and not only because the artistic Word is immortal. Bulgakov suggests something more radical. The Master has not so much created as re-created reality, preserving truth and then releasing it through his novel. For this reason, even he cannot get rid of the document, which is a portal.

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Such a Modernist project, which presumes the existence of other worlds to which poets have privileged access, recalls Bely’s Petersburg. But Bulgakov’s reasons are quite different from Bely’s Faustian search for knowledge in the dual worlds of Symbolism, or Zamyatin’s celebration of the Dionysian impulse in the Mephi beyond the Green Wall. Bely disrupts the “Realist contract” through rhythmic word-symbols. Zamyatin slices visual images along multiple planes to invade and break down familiar worlds. Bulgakov adopts the Tolstoyan strategy of making a story even more truth-bearing if it can be shown to do without words – that is, if it can avoid the indignity of being dependent on one speaker’s limited perspective. Woland introduces this theme in the opening scene.

Mikhail Berlioz, editor, atheist, and head of the Writers’ Union, meets the “strange professor” at Patriarch’s Pond in Moscow. Berlioz and his poet-friend are suspicious of this foreign-looking fellow, especially when the three get into a debate about the historicity of Jesus Christ. Suddenly the professor whispers to them: “Keep in mind that Jesus did exist”:

“You know, Professor,” answered Berlioz with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but we happen to have a different point of view regarding that issue.”

“No points of view are necessary,” replied the strange professor. “He simply existed, that’s all there is to it.”

“But surely some proof is required,” began Berlioz.

“No, no proof is required,” answered the professor.16

At this point the professor’s foreign accent “somehow disappears,” and the first installment of this true story flows out from behind the text. Bulgakov had originally planned his novel as a “Gospel According to the Devil.” This Devil, a sad, thoughtful figure, remains the novel’s wisest, most authoritative source of knowledge, the coordinator of its various planes, and – like Zamyatin’s Mephi – an uneasy ally of the Good. Both sets of events, Woland in Moscow and Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, take place from Wednesday through Saturday night of the vernal full moon (Passover Week). Only in the final minutes of the final night do all levels of the novel unite on the same plane, in a triumphantly ahistorical timelessness. It is a time-space that Tolstoy always dreamed of. Every earthly creature had been in the same doubt, and now they can all be in the same truth. The author does not have to prove or persuade with the illusion of reality. He simply draws back the veil.

Bulgakov’s first biographer suggested that the idea for a “Gospel According to Woland” might even have come to Bulgakov from Tolstoy, who, after his “break” in the 1880s, “rewrote the Gospels to make them more logical and coherent.”17 Bulgakov,the sonofa professor of theologyat theKievan Academy,

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was well versed in religious controversies and texts. He also deeply loved Leo Tolstoy. In the 1880s and 1890s, in pursuit of a faith that was compatible with reason, Tolstoy had produced his own version of the Gospels, deleting all the supernatural prompts. Bulgakov eliminates the same miraculous layers and legends from the Master’s novel. The truth does not need them.

Bulgakov’s Satan figure, Woland, thus emerges as a fascinating bridge figure between our two great nineteenth-century philosopher-novelists. As we saw in the preceding chapter, which introduced Woland conversing with Berlioz’s severed head at Satan’s Ball, this devil is firmly in the Dostoevsky line of “multiple valid truths.” Individuals (in this case, the Moscow public) are allowed to live – and die – by their own professed beliefs. To be sure, most of these beliefs are shoddy, and Woland’s devilish Gogolian retinue forces their hypocrisy to the surface. A more profound debt is owed to that clownish devil who turns up in The Brothers Karamazov, hallucinated by the middle brother, Ivan. Ivan’s devil defends his existence on earth as a guarantee that there would continue to be events, absurdities, human suffering, for “otherwise everything would turn into an endless prayer service,” tedious and undifferentiated.18 Woland defends himself with the same argument, when challenged at the end of the novel by his detractors from the Christian side. “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist,” he retorts to Matthew the Levite, “and what would the world look like if all the shadows disappeared?” (ch. 24, p. 305).

For all his debts to Dostoevsky and Gogol, however, Bulgakov’s Satan also realizes an authorial fantasy very precious to Tolstoy: the ethically ideal relation between an author and a reader. Except when he is the mouthpiece for an installment of Christ’s Passion, Woland is a taciturn man. This is appropriate. He shows rather than tells. Woland might have originated in Ivan Karamazov’s devil. But in Bulgakov he is sobered up, transformed from a chattering buffoon into a seer, and serves both the Gogol–Dostoevsky and the Tolstoy line.