Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Page Count: 402/402

Here I am, posting fashionably late as always – let’s just hope it doesn’t become a habit!  I only just finished my novel earlier this week, and, truthfully, The Master and Margarita was the sort of book that I needed to let “rest” for a bit within the often uninteresting recesses of my brain before I could comment on it (though I doubt that what I do have to say will put any professors of Russian/Soviet literature out of their jobs, but, anyway).

Looking back at my first post on this book, I realise that I didn’t provide much, if any, information about the plot, characters, or anything at all useful, really.  I imagine this was largely because the notoriety – for lack of a better word – of The Master and Margarita far overshadows the actual substance of the novel itself.  Bulgakov began writing it during the tail end of the Soviet Union’s comparatively liberal period, something to which the rise of of Stalin very firmly put an end.  The manuscript of The Master and Margarita remained unpublished until the 1960s, at which point it appeared in censored form, and it would not be published in its full form until a decade later.

It is from this lengthy period of censorship that this novel draws its cultural caché – certainly, this was all I knew going into the novel.  The challenge with reading books like this is that I find it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to forget that they were anathema to the Soviet orthodoxy for some reason or another, and so, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, I found myself constantly on the lookout for those reasons.  With a book like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (which, despite its very short length and two attempts at it, I’ve never actually finished…), they’re rather obvious.  With The Master and Margarita, they’re somewhat less so.  If Solzhenitsyn is the bloke standing on a street corner with a massive placard reading “OCCUPY THE GULAGS,” Bulgakov is the prankster slipping whoopie cushions underneath the posteriors of KGB agents.  I think I did myself a disservice by focusing too much on the political aspects of the book at the outset: it would have been much better to try to enjoy it as I would any other novel, then ponder its broader significance later.  After all, it’s not like I’m an English major or anything…

The plot of The Master and Margarita is about as ridiculous, wonderful, and brimming with miscellany as they come.  It centres on the visit of Satan and his coterie to the Moscow, in which the devil is disguised as a magician named Woland, and havoc wrecked upon the the city’s intelligentsia and bureaucracy on account of that.  The Master is a writer who has been working on a novel about Pontius Pilate and the events surrounding the crucifixion of one Jesus of Nazareth, but, critically shunned and rejected by the writers’ union, he burns the manuscript and seeks refuge in a psychiatric ward.  Margarita is his lover and the focal point of the second half of the novel, in which Satan recruits her to serve as hostess to his annual ball and – a trying experience, to say the least.  At the end of the ordeal, she is, through the devil’s intercession, at last able to be reunited with the Master.  Meanwhile, all of this is running parallel to the goings-on in Jerusalem – it’s something of a novel within a novel, though the Master’s book is just one device through which the author ties these disparate strands together into a more coherent work.

I get the feeling that I could re-read The Master and Margarita at least a few more times before even beginning to piece everything together, so, for now – and for the sake of brevity, that ever admired but distant goal – I’ll limit myself to two observations.  The first is the rather marvellous blurring of the boundaries between good and evil that Bulgakov through the character of Satan.  The average reader has been conditioned to see the devil as, well, the epitome of all that is monstrous and horrid (to put it lightly), but to say that Bulgakov’s depiction of him challenges this conventionality is an understatement.  As Woland, the devil is actually a pretty cool fellow: it isn’t uncommon to see him lounging around in various states of lazy undress, and the bickering that went on among his coterie is full of wit and sarcasm and is terribly fun to read – compared to the uptight and stuffy attitudes of the Soviet literary elite, who wouldn’t like him?  During Satan’s ball in the second half of the novel, however, the reader is reminded of the great cruelty of which this fallen angel is capable.  Through Margarita’s perspective, we are forced to watch the denizens of Hell make their entrance into the event and observe the punishments they must endure for all of eternity.  These scenes were undoubtedly among the most chilling in the book.  The desire to impose a good-bad dichotomy on everything is very much evident in our public memories of the Soviet Union – or any such heavily authoritarian regime, for that matter: we want our artists and dissidents pure and noble, the establishment oppressive and heartless.  But the line between collaboration and resistance, culpability and innocence is much thinner than is often supposed.

The second concerns Pontius Pilate, and I should make it clear from the outset that my familiarity with Christian biblical texts is superficial and patchy at best.  The trial of Jesus occurs in the first part of the novel and ends with Pilate feeling compelled by his official position to send Jesus to his death, which is – and this is what I had to confirm via the great theological authority that is Wikipedia (it is, in fact, possible to get one’s undergraduate degree from a Jesuit university and still know absolutely nothing about the Gospels) – in accordance with the mostly-agreed-upon telling of the story.  The second part of the book finds the prefect of Judea troubled by a sense of guilt over what he has done: Jesus appears in his dreams that night, and he uses his authority to have the traitor Judas murdered in what can only be a rather violent act of repentance.

The novel ends with one of the most beautiful images I’ve ever encountered in literature: arbiter and criminal together, deep in discussion, walking together in the moonlight of some Limbo-like version of the afterlife and echoing the earlier reunion between the Master and Margarita.  It’s such a striking portrait of the reconciliation and love that can only materialise when we understand each other not as partisans or ideologues but as members of a shared humanity.  Perhaps that is why, among other reasons, The Master and Margarita could have never found an audience in its time: the most political thing that one could do in a system as politicised as that of the Soviet Union was to be, quite simply, wholly unpolitical.