The Master and Margarita

You pronounced your words as if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of either shadows or evil. But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and from living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?

If I had rated The Master and Margarita as a purely aesthetic experience immediately after reading, I probably would have given it three stars. I loved the story within the story (that of Pontius Pilate), and the fantastical elements (Margarita's naked flight, Satan's Ball), but the farcical nature of Woland and his henchmen's escapades wasn't interesting to me . But since I understood that this book was very loosely autobiographical and set in the Stalinist Russia that I knew pitifully little about, I decided that some research was in order. Seen in its proper context, The Master and Margarita reveals itself to be a master work, hitting all of the right notes to properly skewer its time and place. Upon reflection, if I didn't know anything about Totalitarianism, Animal Farm might not be any more significant to me than Charlotte's Web.

Even at first blush, I was intrigued by the early scene in which Berlioz, an editor and head of the literary bureaucracy MASSOLIT, explains to Homeless, the poet, why his epic on the non-divinity of Jesus was unacceptable -- the only proper form his work should have taken was to deny the existence of Jesus at all. It's hard to imagine a literary environment in which the artists are completely controlled by the bureaucracy in this manner; especially where they were being used to spread the government's official policy of State Atheism. Yet, this was the atmosphere in which Mikhail Bulgakov wrote this book. He laboured over it from 1928 until his death in 1940, becoming fearful and burning it at one point (but of course manuscripts don't burn), and then recreated it from memory. Subjected to endless edits and reworking, The Master and Margarita was unfinished at Bulgakov's death at 49 years old, and even if it had been ready for publication, the author knew it was too dangerous for anyone to print. It was finally published by his widow in 1966, twenty-six years after Bulgakov's death, ten years after Stalin's. I said I can't imagine, from my cushy, Western perspective a society in which artists don't have the freedom to create, but I know that's the case in North Korea and Iran and Myanmar…and Pussy Riot rots in a Russian prison today…the more things change…

So I have a new appreciation of the roles that farce and satire and humour play in The Master and Margarita, but still I didn't find any of this laugh out loud funny:

"He's clever," thought Ivan, "I must admit there are some smart people even among the intelligentsia."

For some reason, cats are usually addressed familiarly, though no cat has ever drunk bruderschaft with anyone.

“Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped. "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!”

“You are not Dostoevsky," said the woman.
"You never can tell..." he answered.
"Dostoevsky is dead," the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
"I protest!" he said with heat. "Dostoevsky is immortal!” 

And I found the breaking of the fourth wall jarring:

We have no idea whether there were any other strange occurrences in Moscow that night, and we have no intention of trying to find out, since the time has come for us to proceed to Part Two of this true narrative. Follow me, reader!

But that's the end of my complaints. I was most especially intrigued by the story of Pilate and his interaction with Yeshua Ha-Nozri in Yershalaim. The story is just familiar enough to mark Yeshua as the historical figure of Jesus, but different enough in the specifics (27 years old, an orphan) to make him seem like the reluctant and unwilling subject of Matthew Levi's exaggerated biography -- the totally undivine figure that Homeless the poet had imagined him to be. In the end, however, this narrative didn't disprove his divinity either  -- did Yeshua cure Pilate's headache with just a thought? This is very much like the ambiguous conclusion drawn in The Testament of Mary, and as in that book, the resolution of the question of divinity isn't important: this is Pilate's tale and his remorse over not preventing Yeshua's execution marks him for two millennia of a limbo existence. I was fascinated by this book's ability to make me empathise with not only Satan, but Pontius Pilate as well. His release was glorious:

The path of moonlight long awaited by the procurator led right up to the garden, and the dog with the pointed ears was the first to rush out on it. The man in the white cloak with the blood-red lining got up from his chair and shouted something in a hoarse, broken voice. It was impossible to make out whether he was laughing or crying, or what he was shouting, but he could be seen running down the path of moonlight, after his faithful guardian.

And yes, I empathised with Satan in the form of Woland. He arrives in Moscow, interested in studying its citizens and finds them to be greedy and corrupt and craven and paranoid. These are the dangerous judgements which must be hidden inside the farce (and I must admit that I did like the rough justice of the covetous women of the Variety Theater finding themselves naked in the street after fighting amongst themselves over the magical couture). A form of justice is meted out to everyone who invokes the underworld (Hell knows! The devil take me! Really, I would pawn my soul to the devil to find out whether he is alive or dead...) and Woland is not so much evil as weary of the unchanging, and not laudable, nature of man. As Woland tells Margarita at one point, “Everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on.” And in the end , everything is made right -- the shadows are embraced, the literary bureaucracy is taught a lesson, and the Master and Margarita are sent to their reward; the comfort and peace of death:

How sad, ye Gods, how sad the world is at evening, how mysterious the mists over the swamps! You will know it when you have wandered astray in those mists, when you have suffered greatly before dying, when you have walked through the world carrying an unbearable burden. You know it too when you are weary and ready to leave this earth without regret; its mists; its swamps and its rivers; ready to give yourself into the arms of death with a light heart, knowing that death alone can comfort you.

As Pilate said in his interview with Yeshua, "Cowardice is the most terrible of vices." In the writing of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov proved himself no coward. He created an important record of the Stalinist regime and hopefully it will be discovered over and over in years to come by people like me who have so much learn from it.