The Master and Margarita: A Carnival of the Absurd
A review of ‘The Master and Margarita’, by Mikhail Bulgakov; Penguin Classics, 1967.
When the devil arrives in Stalinist Moscow, all hell breaks loose. This is the premise of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a flamboyant, furtive, funny, irreverent and spiritual novel written under the oppressive shadow of Soviet censorship and left unpublished within the author’s own lifetime. It is a dizzying blend of satire, romance and metaphysical inquiry that—somehow—works.
In the first of three overlapping plots, Satan appears at Patriarch’s Ponds in the guise of one Professor Woland. Woland is a foreigner, ‘in Moscow to present a performance of “black magic” and then expose its machinations’. His bizarre retinue — Koroviev, an ‘ex-choirmaster’ and translator; Behemoth, a huge, wise-cracking black cat; Azazello, a hitman; and Hella, a female succubus—are in tow. Together, they target the literary élite and Massolit, their trade union, which consists of corrupt social-climbing bureaucrats, profiteers, and cynics. The second plot deals chiefly with a love affair between the Master, a persecuted writer and, Margarita, who makes a Faustian pact to save him. The third, more a subplot, is a solemn, enigmatic retelling of the trial of Jesus of Nazareth—called Yeshua Ha-Nostri—by Pontius Pilate. The author is the Master. These three plots intersect, moving between the fantastical and mundane, the comic and sublime.
Woland is a foreigner, ‘in Moscow to present a performance of “black magic”’.
Bulgakov is keenly interested in the clash between freedom and oppression, both spiritual and political. Woland’s mischief lays bare the sheer absurdity of the Soviet system, which is so sterile and repressive that even Satan is a liberator. Bulgakov introduces characters that profit from Stalin’s regime and then has Woland expose them; at the same time he remarks directly on housing crises, mass corruption and the presence of secret police, who are behind the ‘disappearances’ of random neighbours, and, at one point, the mysterious teleportation of a bookkeeper. He is exercised especially by censorship and the suppression of creativity. The Massolit writers are universally unsympathetic, for they put personal gain above artistic integrity.
Bulgakov draws a parallel between the shallowness of lust for profit and lust as such. Margarita’s love for the Master elevates their sexual relationship but, crucially, their sexual relationship also elevates what could regress into an empty respectability. Sensuality, which is abundant in the novel, stands in stark contrast to the barrenness of Stalin’s utilitarian, coldly materialist Russia, which denies the ordinary human character. But it is not just Stalinist Russia against which Bulgakov rails. He is deeply critical of the perceived superficiality and vanity of modern life in general. The novel does not shy away from modernity, and is filled with its symbols and regalia: radios, streetlights, cars, trams. A key reason Woland can cause such mayhem is because the people have become so cynical and godless that they do not believe he is Satan and live lives marked by distraction from distraction, producing what Eliot called the ‘mental emptiness’ that leaves ‘only the growing terror of nothing to think about.’
Their sexual relationship also elevates what could regress into an empty respectability.
Eliot’s Four Quartets is the Paradiso of his own Divine Comedy, with The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday standing for Inferno and Purgatorio, respectively. For Bulgakov, too, religion offers an answer to the questions posed by the grim, objectifying atheist materialism of the Soviet worldview. Religion, as the Yeshua subplot indicates, plays a central role in The Master and Margarita. Indeed, it is the backbone of the story: its five chapters appear in the middle of the other plot lines. Woland, who claims to have been at Yeshua’s trial, insists that ‘Jesus existed, he simply existed’, though he does not care if people believe his message. The novel does not endorse any organised religion, but repudiates the soullessness of the Soviet ethos and points to the human need for wonder, transcendence, and moral direction. The atheist social-climbers Woland meets fall for his trickery in part because they are atheists. There is nothing more important in their lives than their worldly satisfaction. A new dress, a party invitation, an apartment — these paltry rewards are enough to keep them amused for a time.
The characters, punished by Woland, have sold their souls for wealth and standing within the Soviet system. Goethe’s Faust is a clear influence; and indeed the novel opens with a quotation from Faust’s Mephistopheles: ‘I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.’ Pilate is redeemed in part because he struggles visibly to reconcile personal conscience with the demands and pressures of authority. Margarita leaves her husband to be with the Master, turning her back on convention in an act of self-sacrifice, but also—in a subversion of the Faustian bargain—strikes a deal with Woland out of love, not greed. Bulgakov’s characters almost without exception express good and bad, hinting at a divine order that transcends simple moral categories, and affirming the intrinsically paradoxical nature of the holy. ‘Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus,’ as Augustine put it in Sermon 117 (‘If you understand, it isn’t God.’) It is interesting that in his brilliant set of essays on Stalinism, The Captive Mind, the Polish dissident writer Czesław Miłosz says, as if in passing, that he isn’t sure consistency is such an important virtue — that, in other words, consistency and comprehension are not the criteria for a just system of belief. The culmination of this paradox is expressed by Yeshua, who in the story is an itinerant philosopher. We are not privilege to much of his conversation with Pilate, but we do hear him say that ‘all men are good.’
The Polish dissident writer Czesław Miłosz says, as if in passing, that he isn’t sure consistency is such an important virtue.
The imagery is striking. A Moscow flat is transfigured into a satanic ballroom, a decapitated man picks up his own head, Margarita flies naked on a broomstick—these moments have a way of etching themselves on our minds. Structurally, characters come and go, plots unravel, and the narrative lurches around. It is part of Bulgakov’s genius that behind and beneath this flamboyance and chaos, which at times seems more like randomness and caprice is a real moral seriousness. It is the opposite, in that sense, of the Soviet state, whose superficial order obsdures a deep moral, political and social disorder. As Christopher Hitchens puts it in Hitch-22, the hallmark of the totalitarian is not consistency but unpredictability.
Much ink has been spilt attempting to categorise The Master and Margarita, which straddles the absurd and the eternal, defending the human, condemning suppression, and saluting artistic freedom and those who seek to express it under tyranny. The creative act is a basically spiritual act, Bulgakov suggests, requiring faith, hope and self-sacrifice. And art, like spiritual feeling, can confront tyranny, stir the heart and console the spirit. It also endures. After all, says Woland, ‘manuscripts don’t burn.’
