The supernatural in The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and how it is expressed in terms of craft
Bulgakov widely used the supernatural in The Master and Margarita because he was a mystic writer and believed in truths that are beyond the rational intellect, and because he wanted to introduce the category of ‘the possible’ in the monolithic, grey and impermeable communist world of the Soviet Russia, to mock it and give a new intellectual and moral education to the Russian readers.
His greatness mostly depends on his ability to deal with the supernatural using first the comic genre and the fantastic, then the tragic and, at the end, the dramatic that encompasses all of them. Moreover, Bulgakov masterfully ranges over three other dimensions: of width, the roominess of the world he creates; of height, the spiritual elevation; and of depth, the profundity of the sentiments, always maintaining a strong coherence in the novel and transmitting that sense of innovation and universality that qualifies a masterpiece.
His writing craft is a perfect tool to reach his ambitious objectives, and a relevant part of his art.
Approaching The Master and Margarita for the first time, there are some discrepancies between Bulgakov’s novel and its genesis, particularly strange. It is not the timing and the way of gestation that is unusual (twelve years could be a ‘reasonable’ period for a revolutionary, hyperbolic and sometimes biblical work that is not a son, a product, of its space-time) but Bulgakov’s relationship with the Institutions and Stalin, as told by the official history (letters, telephone calls, requests). There is incoherence between the strong, innovative messages of the piece and Bulgakov’s personal image as transmitted by the documents and his wife’s memoirs (for a deep analysis of the historical framework of The Master and Margarita, see Note 1), and some questions easily rise: how could he write against the results of the communist ideology and at the same time ask the Institutions for favours and deal with Stalin in person? And especially, why was Bulgakov, while alive, not touched by the wide liquidation of the Russian intelligentsia made by Stalin?
Nevertheless, the doubts about its genesis cannot diminish the greatness of The Master and Margarita. The novel is outstanding from many points of view, especially because it is a rare luminous flower born during the darkest decades of twentieth century Russia, in a desert of death and anguish where the dominant culture was the one of the mutual suspicion and the attention to the everyday survival, leaving little space for poetry and high sentiments.
Going rapidly to the focus of the critical thesis, the supernatural and how it is expressed in terms of craft, already from the second page of the novel Bulgakov introduces this new dimension of ‘the fantastic’ (it is necessary to return later to this term), as if it was only the third oddity felt by the citizen Berlioz in that hot spring sunset that opens the story, after the strange lack of people all around and the loss of his heartbeat for an instant. No word in The Master and Margarita is casual, no name either. So Berlioz, the “editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moskow literary association, called Massolit,” the first character in the novel who would lose his head (in his case, literally) because of the devil, has the name of Hector Berlioz, the French Romantic composer well known for his Grande messe des morts (The solemn mass of the dead). We have to get used to this kind of connections and cross-references, since there are many levels in Bulgakov’s piece that represent an impressive, unusual asset. So we are subtly warned that Bulgakov is raising the curtain over ‘a dramatic mass of the dead.’
Here the introduction to the supernatural:
And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked jockey’s cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air… A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievable thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy.
The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and thought in consternation: ‘This can’t be!…’
But, alas, it was, and the long, see-through citizen was swaying before him to the left and to the right without touching the ground.
There are several notes about the above introduction. The first one concerns the use of the word ‘citizen’, three times during the quoted episode, but recurrent along the entire novel (its first phrase is in fact: “At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds.”). This use is a precise choice and underlines the place, the framework. Soviet Russia was an enemy of all the mysterious or inexplicable things, religion at first, and tried to cancel Saint Mother Russia forcing the concept that what cannot be explained, simply doesn’t exist. As the self is among the things that cannot be explained, the self must not exist. Following Dostoyevsky (the belief espoused by Ivan Karamazov in the early chapters of The Brother Karamazov), if our self doesn’t exist, everything is allowed (deceit, hypocrisy, cheat, exploitation, simulation, betrayal, etc.) except being ourselves. So there are only citizens, not persons or people.
In this monolithic world of citizens Bulgakov pushes (or rather explodes already from the beginning of the story) the wind of popular tales, the description of a kingdom of ‘the possible’ and so, of education about the category of the possible (this is a revolution in the Soviet Russia). There is an indubitable wind that moves “a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance.”In fact, heweaves “himself and sways before him (Berlioz) to the left and to the right without touching the ground.”This movement is essential to the introduction of the supernatural in a static, granitic system, “unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena,” like, later, the deep irony of Woland’s role, “the prince of this world,” as guarantor of the other world: it exists, since he exists.
A second note concerns just Berlioz who is the stereotype of the citizen, so provided with pompous and useless titles, aligned with the Institutions’ will, servile and opportunist, easy prey to the devil. Bulgakov plays with this character with humour saying for example, “The life of Berlioz had taken such a course…”, meaning that Berlioz at a certain moment stockpiled his brain, his head according to the communism policies, and so losing his ability to think by himself, to judge, and see beyond the easy evidences. His reaction to the supernatural is: “ He goggled his eyes and thought in consternation: ‘This can’t be!…’”
Now the fantastic can explode. As I said before, at the beginning Bulgakov’s craft about the supernatural follows the genre ‘fantastic:’ “and here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it.” I use the term ‘fantastic’ only if it isn’t intended as ‘unreal’ but rather more real than reality, as it happens dealing with masterpieces. In fact, each masterpiece works this way, showing universality and allowing the discovery of a deeper, wider reality. However, Bulgakov’s style has not the quick lightness of the Brothers Grimm’s tale, just to make an immediate example of the fantastic, but a ‘cruel realism’ (the definition is by Eugenio Montale), and provokes in us a sort of distressing experience that forces our usual perception, and widens it. We in fact, understand we have already seen “the transparent citizen who weaves and sways” in Marc Chagall’s flying figures, his lovers for example. No one doubts that his lovers don’t exist, because, actually, lovers fly, as each one who falls in love can understand. The flying lovers by Chagall – like the supernatural characters by Bulgakov – widen our sensibility and draw a fantastic world that is not unreal, but more real, more pregnant than reality.
The appearance of Theodor (“God’s gift”) Woland (one of the German names of the devil) shows another interesting aspect of Bulgakov’s craft. Let’s read:
Afterwards, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various institutions presented reports describing this man. A comparison of them cannot but cause amazement. … First of all, the man described did not limp on any leg, and was neither short nor enormous, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. … In short, a foreigner.
In this first description of Woland there is the strong presence of the first-person ‘chronicler,’ underlined by the use, for example, of the phrase “Frankly speaking…” There is a studied multiplicity of voices, of narrators, and sometimes the ‘chronicler’ emerges in a clear way, as if Bulgakov himself wanted to mark, to approach certain parts of the story closely, giving us a privileged, confidential view. That is the case of the description of Woland and then of Margarita.
In any case, the appearance of Woland occurs in a world of which Bulgakov gives only few, rarefied descriptions: the spotlight is only on Woland. On the stage, the scene is bare and there are only two main characters, Berlioz sitting and Woland standing. They discuss, and more and more the quality of the dialogue stands out, with terrific power also in terms of craft. These dialogues empower, always with the same cruel realism, the literary revolution brought by Bulgakov to systematically mock the new citizen as created by the communist progress. The comparison between the characters of Woland and Berlioz is in fact severe.
Analysing these dialogues, it is possible to highlight the following attributes:
– progression, it is my definition, means the development of the dialogues toward the author’s goals keeping the same rhythm, the same effectiveness, without lapses, mistakes, or veering away from the right direction. The dialogues are really interesting and catching, powerful and intense;
– culture, because the dialogues are never superficial but based on a deep, interiorised culture that is Bulgakov’s. Philo of Alexandria, Tacitus, Flavius Josephus, God, Jesus, Tammuz, Immanuel Kant, Schiller, Strauss, Gerbert of Aurillac, the five proofs of God’s existence, etc., are all quoted and used to develop the author’s thesis. No doubt that Bulgakov was ‘a man of culture’ and his craft reflects this quality;
– suspense, since there is a strange, strong tension toward something that is not clear at the beginning, but emerges more and more during the dialogue, up to Woland’s announcement:
He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: ‘One, two… Mercury in the second house… moon gone… six – disaster… evening – seven…’ then announced loudly and joyfully: ‘Your head will be cut off!’
That is the first turning point of the novel, since it becomes clear that nothing is an amusement anymore, but a serious drama;
– humour. The Master and Margarita ranges over three main accounts (Woland’s story, Pilate’s and Margarita’s ones) and embraces all that was excluded from Soviet culture and ideology (the supernatural, the other life, history, religion and Heaven and Hell, love, personal courage, etc.). However, the most revolutionary tool used by Bulgakov is his humour, widely used (the phrase “In short, a foreigner,” for example.) Socialist Realism comes out naked, destroyed by this humour, this clowning way full of irony and buffoonery.
Every dictatorship is afraid of ridicule, and Bulgakov plays with this weakness in a special way:
‘Your head will be cut off!’ Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly: ‘By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?’ ‘No,’ replied his interlocutor, ‘by a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl.’
Now you might ask how a comic style can be at the same time of cruel realism. Generally, comic is cruel or derives from cruelty, so there is no incoherence. Moreover, in Bulgakov the fantastic fits with the real in a natural, never forced way, and the magical potion able to amalgamate the whole is just the comic style, the evident humour;
– sense of surprise. The appearance of the devil in Moscow, a professor specialised in black magic, is not enough a surprise. Woland is also, unexpectedly, the defender of the existence of Jesus (p. 18):
’Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.’… ‘There is no need for any point of view,’ the strange professor replied, ‘he simply existed, that’s all.’… ‘There is no need for any proof,’ replied the professor, and he began to speak softly, …’
It is easy to see that Bulgakov, with a light touch, yet seems to fit with one of the refrains of the Karamazov brothers: “Come to the fact… The facts speak! Shout!” Here the fact is that Satan-Woland was present during the existence of Jesus and so he cannot deny that truth. This is another turning point of the novel, since Pilate’s story develops just around ‘the fact.’ With reference to the craft of writing, the description of this surprise too follows the same rules of naturalness shown in the introduction of the supernatural, the new dimension of ‘fantastic,’ more real than reality.
The passage from the first chapter (Never Talk With Strangers) to the second one (Pontius Pilate) is masterly. There is an effect of ‘fading and overlapping’ that several directors used then in their movies, from a scene to another, only by the 1970s. I think that Bulgakov – with this incredible transition, but especially with the entire new chapter – wanted to underline, or rather to amplify the category of the possible, giving a new intellectual, moral and social education to the reader. Now, how can Bulgakov convey his intent by his craft of writing? The intense poetry and the incredible details used are the answer. While in the first chapter there is a sort of rarefaction of the descriptions (the location is in a certain way given for granted, it is a pale scenery), and the power is mainly in the dialogues, in the extraordinariness of the facts as told, the second chapter excels thanks to its detailed representations.
In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.
This phrase is what Woland is saying at the end of the first chapter, but it is also told by the narrator who continues without interruption at the beginning of the second one (p.19), describing a new world. The style is now different from the one of the first chapter, a style that immediately tacks to the ‘tragic’ describing that world that the two citizens wanted to deny and that, on the contrary, emerges incredibly real. Only through his details, in fact, Bulgakov can move from a generic tale to ‘the fact.’ The fact of Jesus is a historical problem; it doesn’t concern conscience, or points of view, or sentiments, as told by Woland. So the author must give the maximum relief to this representation, using all his senses.
It seemed to the procurator that a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses and palms in the garden, that the smell of leather trapping and sweat from the convoy was mingled with the cursed rosy flux. … A whiff of smoke reached the colonnade across the upper terrace of the palace, and this slightly acrid smoke… … The man was dressed in an old and torn light-blue chiton. His head was covered by a white cloth with a leather band around the forehead. … and saw that the sun already stood quite high over the hippodrome, that a ray had penetrated the colonnade and was stealing towards Yeshua’s worn sandals…
Moreover, Bulgakov defines the fact using the device of the normality. There is nothing extraordinary in the appearance of Jesus (Yeshua Ha-Nozri), in his behaviour. His philosophy and his revolutionary messages are barely hidden under the conversation between Pilate and him, and certain points are revelatory (p. 24): “What is truth?” (It is Pilate’s question to Christ in the Gospel of John, 18:38) “The truth is, first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re having faint-hearted thoughts of death…” Bulgakov escapes from the traps of philosophic or religious speculations, by keeping the discussion in a lower, conversational level. At the same time, Yeshua’s answer reveals his supernatural powers, so confirming again the fact in an ordinary manner.
I was speaking about the dimension of the tragic in the Pilate’s story, against which the comic style crashes. The writing style has changed; it is more evocative and poetic now:
It seemed to Pilate that the pink columns of the balcony and the rooftops of Yershalaim far below, beyond the garden, vanished, and everything was drowned in the thickest green of Caprean gardens. And something strange also happened to his hearing: it was as if trumpets sounded far away, muted and menacing, and a nasal voice was very clearly heard, arrogantly drawling: ‘The law of lese-majesty…’
We are here far from the tone of Woland’s story. Behind there is the power of the Roman Empire, oppressive, looming and threatening, and the ubiquitous shadow of Caesar; there are intrigues and betrayals, the subtle political calculus of the Sanhedrin and the mellifluous voice of Kaifa, and the scenery is the yellow, stifling Yershalaim. Everything slides toward the tragic, because the fact is tragic and in this way it must be told (p. 35):
It was all over, and there was nothing more to talk about. Ha-Nozri was departing for ever, and there was no one to cure the dreadful, wicked pains of the procurator, there was no remedy for them except death. But it was not this thought which now struck Pilate. The same incomprehensible anguish that had already visited him on the balcony pierced his whole being. … The bush laden with roses had vanished, vanished were the cypresses bordering the upper terrace, and the pomegranate tree, and the white statue amidst the greenery, and the greenery itself. In place of it all there floated some purple mass, water weeds swayed in it and began moving off somewhere, and Pilate himself began moving with them. … Here it seemed to him that the sun, clanging, burst over him and flooded his ears with fire. This fire raged with roars, shrieks, wails, guffaws and whistles.
Bulgakov’s craft of writing has dramatically changed, you see, highlighting a cosmic event that nobody can now deny anymore. The power of the Pilate’s chapters is so high that you are forced to think that they are truly the centre of the novel. However, the appearance of Margarita, in the second part, strongly challenges this impression, adding new value to the novel. After the first dimension of width, (the space, the location, Soviet Russia, where the possible explodes) shown in the Woland’s chapter, we are facing now the second dimension of height, of spiritual elevation, of History in Capital: Yeshua and Pilate’s story, where spirit wins against matter. The third one will be the dimension of depth, of profundity of the sentiments: Margarita’s story, where love and personal courage withstand the devil too. Each dimension requires its style, its voice and craft. The sum of these three features creates a new, innovative novel, so far, so different from other pieces that represent the conflict between the individual and the collectivized State. For example, in The Foundation Pit (1930) by Andrei Platonov the tragic allegory is created telling about a group of workers who dig a gigantic pit for a House of Proletariat. This book is strong but monolithic, and reflects the hard reality all around. Contrarily, Bulgakov exchanges the common currency of univocality with polyphony of voices, that is: “combining a number of parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonizing with each other” (Oxford Dictionary).
In the chapter The Seventh Proof, Bulgakov introduces the fantastic yet again in a natural, conversational way (p. 43):
They leaned towards him from both sides, and he said, but again without any accent, which with him, devil knows why, now appeared, now disappeared: ‘The thing is…’ here the professor looked around fearfully and spoke in a whisper, ‘that I was personally present at it all…’
Using the same humoristic tone of irony brought in this case by the parenthesis “devil knows why,” since the devil is just the professor.
In this way, starting from the first appearance of the devil, Bulgakov’s creativity goes on climbing steep stairs of new inventions, without any discrepancy or jerk, so pulling the reader in a logical and consequential intellectual path. Let’s read for example the chapter The Chase (p. 49):
Ivan gasped, looked into the distance, and saw the hateful stranger. He was already at the exit to Patriarch’s Lane; moreover, he was not alone. The more than dubious choirmaster had managed to join him. But that was still not all: the third in this company proved to be a tom-cat, who appeared out of nowhere, huge as a hog, black as soot or as a rock, and with a desperate cavalryman’s whiskers. The trio set off down Patriarch’s Lane, the cat walking on his hind legs.
At this point, you see, the appearance of the important character of the black cat Behemoth is perfectly natural (by the way, also the figure of the black cat is not casual, since it appeared first time in a papal bull by Pope Gregorio IX, in 1235). The category of the possible is already set now and Moscow (Bolshaya Nikitskaya, Herzen Street, Nikitsky Gate, Arbat Square, etc. because all the details are critical, also in that sort of rarefaction of the descriptions of which I spoke before) must accept this strange, comic trio of characters, so contrasting with the typical group of citizens.
And the fantastic tale continues, with a coherent and rapid style (p. 51): “Ivan Nikolaevich was perplexed, but not for long, because he suddenly realized that the professor must unfailingly be found in house no. 13, and most assuredly in apartment 47…” In this way, Bulgakov’s humoristic and magical tale breaks the entire construction of the communism and its certainties: strange things are in fact possible, unheard characters become real, and unusual actions and reactions are the texture of a new, practicable world that overlaps the life of the citizens:
The poor man spends all day reparating primuses. He got hungry … and where’s he going to get currency? … He’s languishing with hunger and thirst, he’s hot. So the hapless fellow took and sampled a mandarin. And the total worth of that mandarin is three kopecks. And here they go whistling like spring nightingales in the woods, bothering the police, tearing them away from their business…
So the scenery keeps the grey taste of the communist progress: the communal apartments, the primus stoves, the lights that burn under orange lampshades, the hoarse roar of the polonaise from the opera Evgeny Onegin, the usual Soviet phenomena of ‘disappearances’, that is the arrests by the secret police: “And then two years ago inexplicable events began to occur in this apartment: people began to disappear from this apartment without a trace.”
Bulgakov deals with this scenery in the most neutral and plain style, even vague. His intent is to add reality (the fantastic, the possible) to reality (everyday life in Soviet Russia) without expressing judgements, yet playing with subtle sarcasm (“inexplicable events began to occur.”) Also the disappearance of the Master himself is treated then in the same dispassionate way.
Sometimes, the ‘chronicler’ emerges again (“Hence there was nothing surprising, for instance, in the following conversation, which the author of these most truthful lines once heard near the cast-iron fence of Griboedov’s…” p. 57, chapter There Were Doings At Griboedov’s) but generally the tale here has its own voice, always with a background of humour that well mixes fantastic and real, like in p.62:
After which, from God knows where, a little light flashed by the cast-iron fence and began to approach the veranda. Those sitting at the tables began to get up and peer at it, and saw that along with the little light a white ghost was marching towards the restaurant… And the ghost, passing through an opening in the trellis, stepped unhindered on to the veranda. Here everyone saw that it was no ghost at all, but Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, the much-renowned poet.
In the chapter “Black Magic and its exposure” there is a sort of rehearsal of the final “The Great Ball at Satan’s”. Bulgakov uses the whole spectrum of his writing craft to deal with crowd scenes, multiplicity of characters and voices, intense dialogues, comic and cruel descriptions. His imagination is boundless, as if he wants to demonstrate that a number of people can be manipulated by a great showman up to the limit, losing their dignity and conscience (and their head), to become ‘dead souls.’ Everything is a cruel representation, and the rhythm of the prose is the same of a macabre music (p. 126):
The fur bristled on the cat’s back, and he gave a rending miaow. Then he compressed himself into a ball and shot like a panther straight at Bengalsky’s chest, and from there on to his head. Growling, the cat sank his plump paws into the skimpy chevelure of the master of ceremonies and in two twists tore the head from the thick neck with a savage owl. The two and half thousand people in the theatre cried out as one… … And here there came a clean breakthrough, and from all sides women marched on to the stage. Amid the general agitation of talk, chuckles and gasps, a man’s voice was heard: ‘I won’t allow it!’ and a woman’s: ‘Despot and philistine! Don’t break my arm!’ Women disappeared behind the curtain, leaving their dresses there and coming out in new ones… … The police went running to Sempleyarov’s box, people were climbing over the barriers, there were bursts of infernal guffawing and furious shouts, drowned in the golden clash of the orchestra’s cymbals. And one could see that the stage was suddenly empty, and that the hoodwinker Fagott, as well as the brazen tom-cat Behemoth, had melted into air, vanished as the magician had vanished earlier in his armchair with the faded upholstery.
Bulgakov describes a crescendo of incredible power and intensity. The rhythm and the craft match together in a splendid symphony. Something terrific is happening and Bulgakov attracts our whole attention and titillate our emotions. In terms of craft, this kind of crescendo with a crowd scene reminds me a modern novel, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Heller too is a maestro in creating strange situations in which only an unnoticed spark can detonate explosive effects of the mass.
Here you can hear the deafening roar and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the silence when you move to the following chapter “The Hero Enters.”In fact, the first phrase is (p. 133): “And so, the unknown man shook his finger at Ivan and whispered: ‘Shhh!…’”
Bulgakov’s command of the writing craft is here impressive and we also understand his musical culture, based on the interiorization of the great composers of the nineteenth century.
Before the second part of the book and the appearance of Margarita, the end of the first part surprises for the complexity of the different stories that blossom and lock together. The meeting with the Master in the psychiatric clinic, for example, opens the door to a classic romance with an unknown woman (she is just Margarita, but we don’t know it yet) and a second episode about Yeshua’s and Pilate’s story.
While the romance is told using the technique of the dialogue between the Master himself and the poet Homeless, and following the archetypal steps of a love story (the casual meeting, the love at first sight, the roses, the May sun, the anxious waits, the shared intimacy, the plans, and then the problems, etc.), the second episode of Pilate’s story excels for its atmosphere and descriptions. In this case, it is the Master himself, who wrote the same story told by Woland-Satan and then burnt it, who tells the moving, tragic account of “The Execution,” (p.178):
Here something blew into the face of the former tax collector, and something rustled under his feet. It blew once more, and then, opening his eyes, Levi saw that, either under the influence of his curses, or owing to other reasons, everything in the world was changed. The sun had disappeared before reaching the sea, where it sank every evening. Having swallowed it, a storm cloud was rising menacingly and inexorably against the sky in the west. Its edges were already seething with white foam, its black smoky belly was tinged with yellow. The storm cloud was growing, threads of fire fell from it now and again. Down the Jaffa road, down the meagre Hinnon valley, over the tents of the pilgrims, driven by the suddenly risen wind, pillars of dust went flying… … Obeying the gestures of the man in the hood, one of the executioners took a spear and another brought a bucket and a sponge to the post. The first executioner raised the spear and with it tapped first one, then the other of Yeshua’s arms, stretched out and bound with ropes to the crossbar of the post. The body, with its protruding ribs, gave a start. The executioner passed the tip of the spear over the belly. Then Yeshua raised his head, and the flies moved off with a buzz, revealing the face of the hanged man, swollen with bites, the eyes puffy, an unrecognizable face…
Despite the fact that this time the narrator is the Master instead of Woland as in the first episode, the voice of Pilate’s story is the same, no doubt: it is the tragic voice of a witness to an execution. However, the presence of a multiplicity of voices in the entire novel is clear and represents an important asset of The Master and Margarita. Judging by the classical parameters, it seems that there are discrepancies and some false notes (for example when the chronicler is too much invasive: “Which the author of these most truthful lines once heard near the cast-iron fence of Griboedov’s…”) However, we are dealing with a piece seventy-years old, and which is maybe forty years ahead of its time (it sometimes recalls pop-art’s fragmentation) and, at the same time, forty years late (in some parts I feel the taste of the Theatre of the Grand-Guignol, specialized in naturalistic horror shows). So I think that the multiplicity of the voices is just a tool that Bulgakov professionally uses to range over various dimensions and break the granitic Soviet world, to confuse and mock it, and also to hide himself (with so many voices, which one could be Bulgakov’s?).
Margarita brings other openings, another writing style and voice. Margarita is the only one who is a match for the devil, and not because she is particularly good or smart (the cultural level in her environment is low, so are the pages dedicated to her: “And devil take you with your learned words. Other-worldly or nor other-worldly, isn’t it all the same? I want to eat!”), but only because she loves. Bulgakov uses the supernatural to highlight the power of the sentiments. Margarita too lives in lightness and deceitfulness, however she is transfigured by her love that frees her from vanity and power’s eagerness. So the writing craft’s tools have to change, according with this new strong character and dimension. The style is now dramatic, including in it fantastic and tragic, of course, but giving a new depth to the whole.
It is the chronicler who introduces Margarita, this time drawing much more attention to himself for a good reason (p. 217):
Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!
This is an important step because it seems that Bulgakov needs our conviction now, our belief. His castle of stories and characters doesn’t endure without Margarita, who is the point, the head of the novel, and the final tool for his thesis. So we must follow Bulgakov, and Bulgakov alone:
She was beautiful and intelligent… Her husband was young, handsome, kind, honest, and adored his wife… Margarita Nikolaevna was not in need of money. Margarita Nikolaevna could buy whatever she liked. Among her husband’s acquaintances there were some interesting people. Margarita Nikolaevna had never touched a primus stove. Margarita Nikolaevna knew nothing of the horrors of life in a communal apartment. In short… she was happy? Not for one minute!
The style has changed. There is a sort of dramatic urgency, of preoccupation, and Bulgakov repeats Margarita’s name again and again, speaking with us, to be sure that we can hear his appeal and introduction. He is not a detached and often humoristic storyteller anymore, but an accomplice now, or rather a person who needs complicity, who wants to be understood, who needs to close all the previous circles of the story to reach his literary and human objectives. That sense of urgency is the basic note of the whole Margarita’s story.
Margarita loves the Master who wrote Pilate’s story (but he is not a writer, he is a historian, he insists, so confirming the thesis of Woland that the fact is only a historical problem) and then disappeared; so she is approached by the devil and accepts to be the queen of The Great Ball at Satan’s (this chapter, so extraordinary, would require a special analysis). In exchange she will get back her Master; also, she accepts to take off all her clothes and rub her face and her whole body with a magical ointment that allows her to sparkle with incredible beauty. Up to the end Margarita will be naked (“Margarita had a black cloak thrown directly over her naked body, and the Master was in his hospital underwear”) and Bulgakov treats this fact with extreme naturalness, we can forget it. With her beauty she will impose her love and will. Eventually death is the award to Master and Margarita, and in a dramatic and grey limbo they will meet Pilate. All the circles are closed now: “’Well then,’ Woland addressed him from the height of his steed, ‘is your farewell completed?’ ‘Yes, it’s completed,’ the Master replied.’”
Is it a happy end? It isn’t at all. It is a dramatic end where all the characters show an infinite fatigue, the devils too (p. 380):
Now he, too, grew quiet and flew noiselessly, setting his young face towards the light that streamed from the moon. … Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mist over the swamps! He who has wandered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over this earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it…
It is a dramatic conclusion, and you can hear the sound of nostalgia for the things already gone; and where the drama of existence is heavy, totalizing, and consuming, leaving the space only to oblivion (p. 384):
Thus spoke Margarita, walking with the master to their eternal home, and it seemed to the master that Margarita’s words flowed in the same way as the stream they had left behind flowed and whispered, and the master’s memory, the master’s anxious, needled memory began to fade. Someone was setting the master free, as he himself had just set free the hero he had created. This hero had gone into the abyss, gone irrevocably, the son of the astrologer-king, forgiven on the eve of Sunday, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.
The ‘cruel realism’ Eugenio Montale spoke about reaches its peak here. And Bulgakov draws a new kind of the dramatic, so different from other previous authors, Russian too, and so fitting with the darkness decades of the twentieth century.
Personally I don’t like the closure of the book, “Epilogue.” It seems to me like a cover put on the story to return it to Moscow, to its everyday life, and so losing a part of its universality, and lowering down its tone. Here the comic tone is forced, imposed. From a musical point of view, it is a false note for me. But this is only a marginal detail in a piece that comprehends human sentiments and destinies in an all-encompassing play.
There are dozens of other stories, in fact, in The Master and Margarita, dozens of vivid characters, hundreds of relevant considerations; so many that some readers compared the novel to a Matryoshka doll. I don’t have this image. For me there are visible wires that connect the different stories and assure the coherence of the whole. Visible wires that Bulgakov could create and link together thanks to his culture and, of course, the long time of gestation.
Take for example The Great Ball at Satan’s: don’t we recall The Solemn Mass of The Dead by Hector Berlioz? Or, consider this phrase of the devil Koroviev (Behemoth and Koroviev are trying to enter Griboedov’s restaurant):
So then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for your identification card? Just take any five pages from any of his novels and you’ll be convinced, without any identification card, that you‘re dealing with a writer. And I don’t think he even had any identification card!
It is a simple and funny dialogue, but once more there is a connection with other levels of the novel: communism’s satire, and especially enslaved writers’ mockery, pride for a literary free past, etc.
Another revealing phrase:
’I’m not afraid of anything, Margot,’ the master suddenly answered her and raised his head, and he seemed to her the same as he had been when he was inventing that which he had never seen, but of which he knew for certain that it had been, ‘not afraid, because I’ve already experienced it all. They tried too hard to frighten me, and cannot frighten me with anything any more.
Up to the end Bulgakov is in fact perfectly consistent yet changing voice, perspectives and points of view, respecting an absolute quality of his strange, realistic writing craft:
This darkness which came from the west covered the vast city. Bridges and palaces disappeared. Everything vanished as if it had never existed in the world. One fiery thread ran across the whole sky. Then a thunderclap shook the city. It was repeated, and the storm began. Woland could no longer be seen in its gloom.
At the end of this critical analysis another aspect must be underlined. The question is: why is Bulgakov so powerful and trustworthy in his fantastic inventions and descriptions? He has an incredible writing ability, no doubt, but this cannot explain everything. I think that the answer has to be found in spiritual, not in technical terms.
For me it is his mysticism that allows the catching results of his piece, transforming “The Master and Margarita” in a universal play that anybody can understand. Bulgakov too defines himself as a ‘mystic writer.’ From Oxford Dictionary: “Mystic: A person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect”.
I think that Bulgakov really “believed in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect,” and his art is able to extract these truths and to present them to the readers in the most natural way. He seems deeply attracted to the mystery, to the supernatural things, so his pages reflect his intense belief, moving from comic to fantastic, to tragic and dramatic, but always lighted up by the soft, pervasive power of mysticism.
Note 1. After Bulgakov’s death (1940), it took about thirty years before an incomplete publishing of the novel in Soviet Russia, full of mutilating obliterations and narcotic changes yet in any case an astonishing revelation. The discovery too of an underground version, made by Einaudi (an Italian publishing company linked to the Italian Left-wing Party – another publisher was then Scherz Verlag in Switzerland) and its immediate translation are strange, as if Soviet Russia wanted to demonstrate that behind the iron fences of Communism, art – a sublime art – was possible, and Stalin had been its inspiring supporter and protector. Don’t forget that in the same period, at the end of the 60s, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Russian tanks, the clandestine books of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Russian gulags, and the trials against the poets Brodsky, Sinyavsky and Daniel, all sentenced to terms in the same gulag, fiercely put in discussion the image of socialism and Stalinism, which needed some sort of rebuilding.
Thanks to the Einaudi translation, the embedded international community (that circus of dwarfs and light dancers so well described by Milan Kundera) could appraise Bulgakov and his masterpiece as if they were products of the communist dream, as if thirty years to permit a possible issue of the book were not the sign of a huge distance between the vision and the messages of the novel and the Soviet world, and the mutilated version dedicated to the local readers was not a decisive proof. What is more, the account that it was Bulgakov who burnt his manuscript at a certain point of his writing, worried or not satisfied, who knows, not the official censure, is still alive despite the fact that Bulgakov wrote several times in the novel his famous aphorisms “Manuscripts don’t burn” and “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.” The last aphorism didn’t appear, of course, in the incomplete novel published in Soviet Russia.
There are dozens of ‘embedded’ reviews: Igor Vinogradov, for example, finds that the main theme of The Master and Margarita is ‘the common human responsibility for the truth in the human world’; Vittorio Strada thinks that Bulgakov shatters the privileges and greediness of the middle class, the same operation made by Vladmir Majakovkij against ‘the middle class restauration’, so the two artists are very similar!