The Master
and Margarita
and the Gospel According to Matthew
"Manuscripts don't burn."
--Satan
speaking to the Master
I've had my copy of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita since January 1992, but have
only just read it this March of 2000. The book was given me for my birthday,
and the woman who gave it to me inscribed it with a birthday greeting in
English, Russian, Polish, and Spanish. Such linguistic overdetermination was
all the rage in 1990s Madison, Wisconsin, where I was then studying as an
undergraduate.
Bulgakov's novel itself has some of the frisson of a birthday
greeting in four languages. Its own overdeterminism isn't linguistic in the
manner, say, of a Finnegans Wake, but there’s something similarly teeming in the tale. One has the
feeling reading it that there are a lot of things that must come together, and
that they finally do come together wonderfully, perhaps a bit too wonderfully
for such a multiplicity.
The novel tells a complicated story of redemption woven between
two distant temporal planes: there is the time of the crucifixion of Jesus of
Nazareth in 30-something A.D., and there is the time of early Soviet rule in
modern Moscow. The reader is taken back and forth between these two eras, one
chapter unfolding in ancient Palestine, the next in Moscow, the following again
in Palestine, and so on. Among the figures "redeemed" are not only
the Master and Margarita of the title, but also the Roman Procurator of Judea,
Pontius Pilate, the historical figure known from the Gospel accounts. Both
historical settings are built up in a mainly realistic narrative fashion, with
the interesting twist that the story of Jesus and Pilate is told with more of a
realistic bent than is the story of Bulgakov's modern Moscow.
Although redemption is clearly one of Bulgakov's thematic centers,
and although the spiritual universe projected is nominally the Christian one,
the redemption one finds here is not likely to be accepted as such by Christian
readers. This is because Bulgakov's Christian universe is heterodox in the
extreme. It is obvious he is using both the story of Jesus and Pilate and the
figure of the Devil in an entirely unorthodox way. Before continuing with
remarks such as these, however, it is best to put Bulgakov's efforts in a
clearer literary historical perspective.
The Master and Margarita is a grotesque comic novel in a particular
tradition of European black humor, one that includes, among the Russians,
Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol. Bulgakov continues the tradition from these
Russian forebears. Both Gogol and Dostoyevsky were Christians, and the genre,
especially with Dostoyevksy, developed in the crucible of Christian existential
concerns. In the classic Russian novel, the writers' Christian concerns were
often dramatized against a backdrop of decadent Russian secularism: a shallow
Westernizing progressivism that both Gogol and Dostoyevsky saw as undermining
the spiritual wealth of Russian culture. Although writing in the same
novelistic tradition, Bulgakov himself was not a Christian, and so one wouldn't
expect him to take the Christian questions as seriously as did the great
nineteenth century writers. Bulgakov was free, however, to adopt the Christian
"mythology" as part of his framework, adopting along with it the
problem of evil and the Devil, and developing his novel from there.
When an unbeliever adopts Christian beliefs as part of the plot or
setting of a literary work, the results are usually flippant or hollow. Does
Bulgakov's novel come off as flippant? In many respects it does. The exploits
of Satan and his sidekicks are narrated as elaborate pranks, usually in a
burlesque mode. Also, as the novel's end nears, the reader realizes that the
Devil himself will be called upon to.... But finishing this sentence would
reveal too much of Bulgakov's plot. It is maybe better to let readers encounter
Bulgakov's Satan on their own. An important question here might be: How do
cosmic good and evil as projected through the novelist's supernaturalism relate
to the social world he's satirizing in his Moscow chapters? This is a difficult
question, one I will address in part below. Let me now just mention that many
readers have apparently understood Bulgakov's Satan to be an allegorical figure
for Stalin.
For me, the most impressive aspect of The Master and Margarita is its retelling of the
story of Jesus and Pilate. Bulgakov obviously held to the now common belief
that the Gospel versions of Jesus' life are heavily fictionalized and
tendentious: they are later elaborations upon a series of real historical
events that are now lost forever. In his Palestine chapters, these historical
events as they might actually have happened are reconstructed in detail. I
believe the novelist's efforts here are both painstaking and genuine. This is
to say he clearly worked hard to reconstruct the historical milieu of Jesus'
passion, as he obviously spent much time mentally backtracking from the Gospel
accounts in order to get at what might have been their historical kernel.
Mainly at issue is the Gospel According to Matthew. The evangelist
Matthew is himself presented in the character Matthu Levi. A careful study of
Bulgakov's "Gospel" in relation to both the biblical book of Matthew
and other historical sources would make for a fascinating long article. Without
going into details I haven't checked--and which would be hard to check, anyhow,
here in Taiwan--I would like to raise a few worthwhile points:
1) Bulgakov strategically
avoids an elaborate presentation of the character of Jesus. The Jesus we can
extract from his narrative is all the more powerful for this spare
presentation. Interestingly, Bulgakov's Jesus complains at one point about the
scribe following him around, namely Matthu Levi, a man who, he says, is always
writing things down on a goatskin parchment, and who always gets everything
wrong. Wryly, then, with a sentence that echoes down through the centuries,
Bulgakov has Jesus himself voice the concern of all those who suspect the four
evangelists of intentionally misrepresenting Jesus of Nazareth's teachings.
Bulgakov is clearly the canonical novelist (the novelist as mascot) of that scissor-wielding
crowd of academic iconoclasts who make up the field now known as Historical
Jesus Studies.
2) Bulgakov's presentation of Judas Iscariot is itself a
fascinating piece of irreverence. We learn that Judas wasn't even a disciple of
Jesus, but rather a petty informer hired ad hoc to lure Jesus into making
statements against the Roman authorities. After receiving his payment Judas
feels no guilt. Instead he strolls contentedly through the streets of
Jerusalem, and forthwith takes up the offer of a tryst with his mistress Niza,
who turns out to be his betrayer. She lures him outside the city limits, to the
Garden of Gethsemane, where he meets his executioners.
3) It has long been noted that the New Testament texts place the
blame for Jesus' execution on the Jewish religious authorities of Jerusalem
rather than on the Roman imperial authority. Central in this regard is of course
the Roman governor Pilate and his famous "washing his hands" of the
burden of Jesus's death (Matthew 27:24). Bulgakov's chapters implicitly explain
for us why Pilate's character comes off so well in the Gospel versions. The
tale may be summed up as follows: Impressed by Jesus' wisdom at the
interrogation, Pilate became a sort of secret advocate of the condemned, even
to the point of finally arranging for the murder of the man who'd betrayed him,
one Judah of Kerioth, or, as he's more commonly known, Judas Iscariot. This act
of retribution, once revealed to Matthu Levi, effects a bond of sorts between
Pilate and the future evangelist. Although the furious Matthu flatly refuses to
take up the post Pilate offers him--that of personal librarian at his estate in
Caesarea--he is nonetheless forced to reassess Pilate's role in Jesus' death.
Whatever else Matthu's future Gospel will contain, the reader recognizes that
it will have to reflect what Matthu learns during his meeting with Pilate. The
evangelist ends by requestiing a new sheet of parchment from the Procurator.
Hopefully these few points
give some notion of the character of Bulgakov's "Gospel". I myself
would like to pursue these questions further, but here in Taipei, where I
reside, I don't expect the libraries to have much in English on Russian
literature. Probably a chapter from the standard biography would give me
something of Bulgakov's own ideas and sources for his tale. Doubtless there are
a couple dissertations out there on this very question. Should anyone have
anything they can send me electronically, I'd appreciate it.
Before closing I'd like to return briefly to the problem of
"evil." I put the word in quotation marks because it is mainly a
question here of a kind of comic or burlesque evil. On the cover of my
paperback edition the New York Times critic is quoted as calling the novel "a
vast and boisterous entertainment." This word boisterous describes much of the novel:
those chapters, namely, where the activities of Satan and his gang are narrated.
Contemporary readers might find these sections heavy-handed, even tedious. They
seem appropriate to a sense of entertainment that is no longer ours. In any
case the question of the satirical value of these chapters raises itself. Why
or how are they integral to Bulgakov's satire?
One aspect of Soviest society may go a long way in illuminating
the character of the burlesque here. In the Moscow of the Bolsheviks, the
supernatural itself was transgressive, forbidden. I think this point, easy to
forget for the Western reader, is crucial for understanding not only the
original appeal of the Devil's antics in the novel, but also the satiric thrust
of Bulgakov's art. One catches something of this thrust in the frequent use of
the word "scandalous" to describe the novel's supernatural
happenings. The narrator frequently uses the adjective "scandalous"
where we'd use adjectives like "unbelievable" or "amazing."
This usage is an echo of Soviet ideology. For the materialist Marxist
ideologues who ruled Moscow any evidence of the intervention of supernatural
beings was necessarily a "scandal." Of course this was equally true
whether those supernatural beings were angelic or demonic. From the Bolshevik
point of view, the charge of such beings would be the same in either case:
their presence undermined the official state doctrine of dialectical
materialism. And so Bulgakov's demonic chapters, mixing the supernatural with a
realistic depiction of contemporary Moscow, were necessarily considered
transgressive by Soviet critics. That Bulgakov had made his demons farcical
didn't dull their sting enough for the censors. Because of this--and much else
that stung them besides--The Master and Margarita remained unpublished until
1967, long after the author's death.
The satirical power of the Devil's minions is thus in some sense a
negative one. Those characters who encounter the Devil's deeds in this tale are
almost unanimously unwilling to believe the evidence offered by their own eyes.
Bulgakov shows them constructing elaborately complex "logical"
explanations for the impossible things they see. Eventually, as more and more
impossible evidence comes forward, it becomes clear that the authorities have
only one crutch to stand on: the notion of a kind of mass hypnosis. All the
absurd and impossible events that have rocked Moscow must be the work of a band
of very talented "foreign hypnotists." That this explanation is
hardly plausible doesn't stop it from receiving unanimous approval, even from
those who suffered the Devil's work firsthand, for example the poet Ivan
Homeless. The narration of this unanimous acceptance of official explanations
has in itself a broadly satiric sting, particularly in the context of Soviet
communism. The message is obvious: it is precisely the Soviet press that
performs hypnosis; it is the Soviet press that daily forces people not to see
things that are right before their eyes and, contrariwise, that forces them to
believe firmly in things that don't exist in the real world.
Bulgakov's novel is multivalent, overdetermined, impressive. As
with many other great Russian novels, the work's weaknesses are somehow
inextricably tied up with its brilliance. Should we, then, consider The
Master and Margarita as work of the same caliber as that of Gogol and Dostoyevsky--these
two writers, after all, being the founders of the tradition Bulgakov follows?
One is inclined to say No. But certainly, for those who know something of the
Bible and something of the European tradition, The Master and Margarita is well worth study.
Eric Mader
March, 2000
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