Old Nick and the Magician of Moscow
Mikhail Bulgakov and the Re-enchantment of Literature
In 1925, Bulgakov wrote what was to become his best know work during his lifetime. The White Guard, dramatised in 1926 as The Days of the Turbins, is the realistic and touching tale of a monarchist family in Kiev during the revolution and civil war. The fact that the story failed to portray Communist heroes—concentrating instead on the effects of national upheaval upon the Russian gentry, intelligentsia and White Army officers—did not endear it to the censors. Its publisher dropped the book, which was being serialised in a magazine, and no complete version was published during Bulgakov’s lifetime. And the play was repeatedly banned and rewritten by the censors. Bulgakov saw his work for stage and page as equally important: his tragedy was that much of his output in both areas was proscribed, mutilated and vilified during his lifetime.
Stalin saw The Days of the Turbins several times—and it is widely reputed to have been one of his favourite plays. This may have been a factor in Bulgakov’s survival: he may have been silenced, an internal exile forced to live in conditions of squalor and poverty, but at least he was spared the arrest and disappearance meted out to writers like Babel and Mandelstam.
The Devil Rides Out
Bulgakov began work on The Master and Margarita in 1928. It’s a shape-shifter of a novel, a slice of interactive fiction with no contingent choice-points in the text itself. Every reader brings a different set of concerns and tastes—and each gets a slightly different book. Your political frame of reference, gender, literary taste, culture, life experience and the times you’re living through determine the narrative you read.
It’s a remarkable piece of literary alchemy. A fusion of the Faust legend, fragments of autobiography, an alternative version of the last days of Christ, a Kafkaesque tale of political repression and a quietly impressive meditation on the rôle of the artist in a society bereft of imaginative freedom and enchantment. These narrative elements are set against a background of literary game playing, slapstick comedy, paranoid satire and startling violence. So, plenty to appeal to fans of George Perec, Mack Sennett, Thomas Pynchon and Quentin Tarrantino.
The narrative structure is intricate, dense and highly mysterious. The book begins by inter-weaving two apparently unconnected tales and later introduces a third. The unification of these competing multi-level plots is an audacious feat of narrative control, upstaging even William Gibson’s bravura juggling of storylines in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The first thread, freighted with exuberant imagery and sharp satire, concerns a visit to contemporary (1930s) Moscow by the devil, in the guise of German philosopher and stage magician Professor Woland. Woland and his infernal retinue, including a talking cat and a hit man with appalling dress sense, lead the citizens of Moscow into irresistible temptation—only to expose them to intolerable humiliation and unendurable torment. The grimmest and most hilarious fates are reserved for the hypocrites, control-freaks and mediocrities of the city’s theatrical and literary establishment. There are detailed references to incidents in the author’s life and satirical shots at the repressive control of the arts under Stalin, including score-settling in the form of retributive violence towards characters based on Bulgakov’s real enemies. Early in the book, Berlioz, chairman of the MASSOLIT literary association, is spectacularly decapitated. Berlioz is, of course, based upon Leopold Averbakh, Bulgakov’s persecutor and head of RAPP.
The second main thread—rendered in a more sombre, naturalistic style—is an enigmatic and complex retelling of the Christian gospel story. It’s set in ancient Yershalaym (Jerusalem)—and based around the fateful encounter between Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus) and Pontius Pilate. But this story, in contrast to the Moscow segments, is stripped of all its traditional imagery and mythic resonance. Bulgakov’s deadpan Yeshua prefigures the recent gritty portrayals of Christ by Norman Mailer and Jim Crace. Pilate, beset by migraines and wracked with guilt, is one of Bulgakov’s most fully drawn characters. He’s a figure who elicits our sympathy, but his sinister manoeuvrings and assassination orders provide the book’s most direct echo of the violence and repression of Stalin’s regime.
