The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

In 1985, after I graduated from Cal Arts, I got a job working at a bookstore. To get the job, the owners had the applicants take a test where we were asked to identify a long list of books. We were given the title and asked to name the author, or given an author and asked to name a book they wrote, or given a title and asked which section in the store we would find it. Is Gifts of the Sea a photo book, or a poetry book, or a science book? What we Talk About When we Talk About Love isn’t in pop psychology; it’s Raymond Carver’s book of short stories.

I did pretty well on the test, well enough to get the job. I had read a lot of books by then. And I was aware of more books than I had read. But one book that I had never heard of before working at the bookstore was The Master and Margarita. The bookstore owner told me it was one of the great novels of the 20th century, an idiosyncratic book, and a favorite of a lot of readers. I was curious. I made a first attempt to read it several years ago but never got past the second chapter (I’ll tell you why in a minute). Now I’ve read it.

The Master and Margarita was written by Bulgakov over more than a decade. He stopped writing with the book mostly finished just a few weeks before he died in 1940. He never attempted to publish it. He was correct in realizing it would lie outside the bounds of acceptability in Stalinist Russia. In fact, he had burned a first attempt at the novel before re-writing the whole thing, wondering why he even bothered to write a novel destined to be un-read. Bulgakov spent his literary life under the dubious notice of Stalin. Stalin both admired his work and also exerted careful and direct control. Born in 1891, Bulgakov was trained in medicine. He served in the Red Cross during the First World War. Later he developed Typhus and was forced to remain in Russia when most of his family emigrated to Paris. He took up writing but found his work officially banned. Stalin personally refused his request to leave Russia but found him a position working for a small theater. He wrote plays, some produced, others suppressed. He published a few short stories and articles in journals. He worked secretly on his novel. The Master and Margarita was first published in a Russian magazine in a censored form in 1967. The full manuscript was published in Paris the next year and then an edition of that version was published in Estonia so the text made it back into Russia. English versions are numerous. The translation I read is from 2011 by Michael Karpelson.

The story takes place in Moscow in the spring of 1929. The opening scene is a dialogue on a park bench between the editor of a literary journal (his name is Berlioz – hint, hint) and a poet who has been commissioned to write a piece for the editor about Jesus and Pontius Pilate. The dialogue is interrupted by a foreigner who is curious about their conversation. The mysterious foreigner performs several startling acts, such as offering a cigarette and then producing the exact brand called for, and when the editor begs to excuse himself because he needs to get to a meeting, the foreigner announces that the meeting will never happen predicting the editor’s death, the exact manner and sequence of events that will cause the accident, and the aftermath. The death takes place in the third chapter, exactly as foreseen, needless to say.

But meanwhile, in the second chapter, and here is where the novel lost me on my first attempt, we are suddenly in Jerusalem with Pontius Pilate interviewing Jesus after his arrest. This is not the poet’s version mentioned in the first chapter. Supposedly this is the mysterious stranger’s story of what he actually witnessed two thousand years ago in Jerusalem. But actually, as we discover later, this is the stranger’s recitation of a chapter in a novel written by “the Master.” It’s not exactly the Biblical version of the story, but plausible. Jesus is a naive simpleton, trusting. He sees the good in all people. He has no crowd of followers, only one disciple. The chapter ends with Pilate pronouncing the death sentence and the crowd outside asking for Barrabbas (“Bar-rabban”) to be released. And then back to Moscow for Chapter three.

Most of the novel takes place on that spring afternoon in Moscow and over the next few days. The literary editor dies. He is beheaded in a tram accident. The poet witnesses the accident and given its horror and the exacting prediction from the mysterious stranger he attempts to warn others. The unhinged poet is sent to an insane asylum. Two other characters will end up in the asylum by the middle of the novel. (The asylum’s lead doctor is named Stravinsky.) The mysterious stranger takes over the literary editor’s apartment. He’s revealed to be Satan and his four compatriots are introduced: two strange men, a strange woman, and a huge cat, also strange. Satan books himself with a magic act at a local Variety theater. (The theater’s finance director is named Rimsky.) The show also includes a beheading. The theater director is magically spirited to Yalta. It’s all mad-cap, and chaotic. And cruel.

And boring. The problem with characters like the devil and his comrades, is that if anything is possible, nothing is surprising. I don’t find it funny. Or exciting. Just tedious. Particularly because Satan’s action are motiveless. He seems to have no purpose in Moscow except to sow chaos. There is probably a good deal of piercing satire of life under Stalin going on here. But whether it’s Satan or Stalin causing the motiveless chaos and cruelty it amounts to the same thing. I have great sympathy for anyone forced to live such a way. But as a reader I wanted to flee Bulgakov’s fictional Moscow probably as much as he did the real one.

The Master is finally introduced, at the insane asylum, on page 133. Margarita waits to appear until page 221, the beginning of chapter 19 and “Book Two” of the novel. She is married but in love with the writer she calls “The Master”. She admires the novel he has written about Pontius Pilate. But the Master, in despair over his novel’s rejection by the literary gatekeepers of Moscow, destroys his manuscript and gives up writing. He succumbs to depression and ends up at the asylum. Margarita stays with her husband not knowing where the Master has gone to.

Then, randomly, the devil chooses Margarita to be the queen of his annual ball for Walpurgis night. He chooses her only because his queen must be named “Margarita”. (“Marguerite” is the name of Faust’s love interest in Goethe’s Faust and in Berlioz’s oratorio The Damnation of Faust.) She agrees. A magic cream rubbed into her skin transforms her into a witch for the evening. She flys around. She presides over the ball. In payment, Satan grants her a wish. She asks to be re-united with the Master, and they are, briefly in life and then eternally, in the after life.

Why all the composer’s names? Well, besides The Damnation of Faust, (1846) Hector Berlioz also wrote Symphonie Fantastique, (1830) whose five movements include scenes of a ball, a witch’s sabbath, and an execution by beheading. Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (1918) is a story of a soldier’s deal with the devil based on a Russian folktale. Night on Bald Mountain is actually by Mussorgsky (1867) but it is best known in an arrangement by Rimsky-Korsokov from 1886. The music depict a witch’s sabbath. In the Pontius Pilate chapters, Bulgakov also refers to the hill where Jesus is executed as Bald Mountain although in the bible it’s named Golgotha: the place of the skull.

Meanwhile there is another chapter of the Pontius Pilate story: Jesus’s crucifixion. Later there are two more chapters concerning Judas’ death (murder not suicide) and Jesus’ burial (no resurrection). And back in Moscow after the night of the infernal ball there are a few more scenes of the satanic party causing mischief around the city. There’s also a chapter where the poor Moscow mortals try to make sense of what’s happened. The final scene is our poet from the opening remembering the bizarre happenings every year thereafter on the anniversary.

What’s it all mean? Certainly there’s a lot of Stalinist Russia commentary going on here. A lot of Satan’s mischief involves the scarcity of apartments and people getting into trouble for holding foreign currency. Clearly Bulgakov is interested in the person of Jesus and Christian theology. Bulgakov’s father was a professor of theology and his grandfather was a Priest. But those invitations to deeper meaning don’t disguise what is mostly entirely a novel of magical fantasy and black comedy. I suspect those who like this novel like it for those reasons, not the political or theological content.

I didn’t like it. Though recognizing its worth, it’s just not my thing. Call it a matter of taste. Not good taste or bad, so no offense to Bulgakov or his admirers, but I’m not a fan of supernaturalism, or cartoon-style violence, and I don’t find the question of what really happened with Jesus and Pilate to be that interesting a question.