Old Nick and the Magician of Moscow
Mikhail Bulgakov and the Re-enchantment of Literature
We have no longer in any country a literature as great as the literature of the old world, and that is because the newspapers, all kinds of second rate books, the preoccupation of men with all kinds of practical changes, have driven the living imagination out of this world.
—W.B. Yeats (1904)
Proto-magic realist, slipstream writer avant la lettre, scathing satirist, passionate observer of the human condition, doughty opponent of the state control of literature and—bizarrely—the author of one of Stalin’s favourite plays: Mikhail Bulgakov was a difficult writer to pin down. He disdained literary boundaries, striving to set down a truthful, but not necessarily realistic, vision of the world in an astonishing variety of forms, styles and genres. And he wrote with tremendous élan in all of them.
The range of Bulgakov’s fictional concerns is huge, taking in politics, science, myth, human folly, suffering, cruelty, betrayal, religion, nostalgia and the rôle of the artist in society. But his writing does have its trademarks: his most accomplished work tends to be characterised by a fusion of poignant autobiography and sharply focused fantasy. Bulgakov’s mission was to reintroduce what Yeats called “the living imagination” into a literary culture that had come to see books as mere sales brochures for the policies of the state.
A Charm against Burning
There’s a scene in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia where a classical scholar declares her grief at the loss of thousands of works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristotle in the burning of the great library of Alexandria. The comfort she is offered by her tutor connects to the timeless nature of the creative impulse and the indestructible nature of ideas: “We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.”
This upbeat view of the durability and value of artistic endeavour also constitutes a central theme of The Master and Margarita, the best-known work by Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov—whose own grief at the incineration of manuscripts came from bitter personal experience. In one of the book’s key scenes, the devil, paying a clandestine visit to Moscow in the 1930s, asks to see a copy of a controversial novel. On being told that the original manuscript has been burned on a stove he says: “Forgive me, but I don’t believe you… That cannot be. Manuscripts don’t burn.” And the manuscript re-materialises.
The words of the book’s urbane Old Nick have echoed down the years, becoming a prophecy of its survival and a charm to protect it from the flames of the author’s stove—despair having driven Bulgakov to burn several of his earlier works.
At the time of his death in 1940, few of Bulgakov’s plays had been produced, little of his prose fiction had been published and he was still dictating revisions to the manuscript of The Master and Margarita. The book began to slip past the censors in 1966, but no complete version of the text was published until 1973.
Today, it’s not merely a bestseller in Russia—it’s the icon at the centre of a leisure and heritage industry: there are tourist attractions based on the book’s locations, it’s the subject of a weekly radio quiz and there’s even a Master and Margarita hairdresser. Fortunately, fans of the book will know not to ask for a Berlioz cut (see below). And its impact has been international: the first UK publication in 1967 bought a small but enthusiastic readership; thirty years later it was ranked 63rd in a Waterstones/Channel 4 reader’s poll to identify the “Books of the Century.”
Towards the end of his life, Bulgakov grew tired of hearing the assurance of friends and well-wishers that his work would find an audience after his death. And it’s easy to understand his frustration at being unable to share his perceptions of Stalin’s Moscow with his fellow Muscovites. But, while Bulgakov’s work is crammed with stinging anti-Soviet satire and strongly autobiographical material, his reflections on the transcendent potential of art, the crushing orthodoxy of coercive government and the need for a spiritual perspective on life remain vital and challenging. There is much in his complex, allusive and often mysterious tales that speaks directly to contemporary readers.
