Dressed in his black soutane—an interesting, and very specific, choice of dress for Woland, this is the cassock normally wom by the secular clergy of the Catholic church.
shacks condemned—as Bulgakov was writing, this area (where the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer had been demolished), was to be completely redeveloped to make room for a Palace of the Soviets, which, however, was never built.
I prefer Rome—Azazello is certainly thinking of something specific here—he seldom speaks, but when he does, it is important. While Moscow was supposed to become the "third Rome" according to ancient Russian predictions, an idea recycled by various Russian thinkers over the centuries, this doesn't seem quite enough to prompt Azazello's comment. However, it makes more sense if there is another parallel, another event in Rome at which this band might have been present, namely the famous burning of Rome under Nero in 64 A.D. Bulgakov had originally planned to have the entire city of Moscow burn at the end of this novel, but changed his mind, and had only specific locations go up in flames.
He has not earned light, he has earned peace—this is a crucial statement. Even in earlier drafts, the Master was not intended to go to the light. There are various theories about this, but the one that seems most convincing is that the Master gave up faith in himself completely, a great sin in the eyes of the author of Faust, for example, who conveys the message that striving is all. In Dante's Divine Comedy the moon, a major fascination of the Master's, is the place for those who have left vows unfulfilled, perhaps as a result of outside pressures over which they had no control, but their vows are unfulfilled nonetheless. One might easily conclude that the Master has not fulfilled his vow to be a writer, to continue to work. Dante underscores that the moon is the abode of those who did not return to their mission as soon as the external pressure was taken away.
a dash for Timiryazev—that Ls, for the famous statue of K. A. Timiryazev (1843-1920) on Tverskoi Boulevard. Timiryazev was a famous botanist.
CHAPTER SO
Time to gol—another Pushkin reference, to his poem of 1834, "Pora, moi drug, pora!"—"It's time to go, my friend, it's time to go!" This short lyric contains a very appropriate line about there being peace and freedom only in death.
Peace be unto you—another displaced biblical element. These words are found in Luke 24:36, as the resurrected Christ speaks to the apostles—appropriate here, since a resurrection of sons is to take place.
stained the color of blood—actually, as stated earlier, Falernian wine was amber-colored. Bulgakov planned to change this to the red Cecubum, but had not coordinated the change.
you are thinking—as in Descartes' "1 think, therefore I am."
the sign of the cross... Fil cut your hand off—here, rather than in the Pilate chapters, is the Russian adjective from the word "cross," a word previously avoided; here also is the only direct clash of the Satanic with the Christian. It may be telling that the Christian tries to perform an action which Azazello stops with words.
Farewell, disciple—the parallel with Yeshua and Levi Matvei is here made clear.
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CHAPTER 31
Sparrow Hills—a very famous location in Russian literature, used in a number of works, most famously in Alexander Herzen's (1812-70) memoirs. In I93S the name was changed to Ix-nin Hilb. Under any name, this location has a wonderful view of Moscow.
CHAPTER 32
Gods, my godsl How sad the earth—this subsequently very famous paragraph was written when Bulgakov knew he was going to die of nephrosclerosis, the same disease which had killed his father at almost the same age. This paragraph's ending, "knowing that death alone...,* was apparently deliberately left unfinished by Bulgakov who dictated it to his wife. Earlier versions used Elena Sergeevna's addition: "would calm him." This section is reminiscent of the end of Aida, when the lovers sing the duet "O terra, addio" ("Farewell, Earth") as death is approaching.
That knight once made a joke—of course a play on dark and light is found in the epigraph to this novel.
the best jester—Behemoth may be inspired by the character of Tyl Eulenspiegel, hero of Richard Strauss' symphonic poem and of Charles de Coster's novel of the same name, which was very popular in Russia. Tyl, a legendary Flemish joker, wreaks havoc wherever he goes, first in the market, then among clergymen and pedagogues. He ends by being beheaded.
boulders appeared—Pilate's place of exile appears to be Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland, which is where an apocryphal source called "The Death of Pilate" put him. According to legend, the Romans buried Pilate in the middle of the mountains; on every Good Friday, the devil lifts Pilate's body out of its grave and puts it on a throne of stone, where Pilate makes the gesture of washing his hands.
Twelve thousand moons—this would seem to be an error. Two thousand years would add up to 24,000 moons.
Romantic Master—an important point. Although writing in the time of the triumph and tyranny of Socialist Realism, Bulgakov, like the Master, felt himself to be more akin to Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, such as Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, etc. There are many kinds of Romanticism, of course, but judging strictly by Bulgakov's works, it is dear that a belief in the value of the vision of the individual artist is paramount. Bulgakov felt he was reading about himself in an article he found on Hoffmann, which included the following ideas: a real artist is doomed to solitude; art is powerless in the face of a reality which is destructive to art; the artist is not of the ordinary world; clarity and peace are needed for creation. In this same article on Hoffmann Bulgakov underlined a passage to the effect that the man of genius is caught between two possibilities: if he concedes to reality he will become a philistine, but if he doesn't, he will die before his time or go mad. Bulgakov is also at pains in this novel, however, to present the work of art as a revelation granted to the inspired artist—the Master says that he "guessed" it all, not that he made it all up. Here we are dealing with the ancient idea of the artist as the instrument of divine inspiration.
listen to Schubert—although this Romantic composer, who died very young, set several poems by Goethe to music (including a song from Faust), he has additional significance for Bulgakov. Like Bulgakov, Schubert suffered from constant defeat in his life as a composer, and was profoundly depressed for personal reasons as well. He produced beautiful melodies marked by spontaneity and joy, but melancholy, suicide and death became his frequent themes. Like Bulgakov, Schubert worked right up
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until his death, and only long after his death were the true dimensions of his talent revealed to the musical world. There is every reason to believe that Bulgakov identified strongly with Schubert's fate, both personal and professional.
Woland... plunged into the gap —parallels the hell ride which is the high point of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust.
Sunday morning —i.e., Easter Sunday. Like Faust and The Divine Comedy, The Master and Margarita is an Easter novel. Easter is the most ancient and holy day of the Christian calendar, and, like Passover, is based on calculations involving both lunar and solar calendars. Since the calculations have been done differently at different times, it is hard to say whether Bulgakov unity means the Pilate narrative to be occurring at precisely the same time as the Moscow one. Certainty the days of the week involved are the same, Wednesday through early Sunday. The Yanovskaya text contains a serious error here, possibly one of proofreading. Throughout this work, and especially in the Pilate narrative, Bulgakov has carefully avoided words like "cross," "resurrection," etc., and here the Russian is easily mistaken. The Yanovskaya text says Pilate was absolved on the morning of the nsvmction. The difference between "Sunday" and "resurrection" is one letter in Russian. The author has been meticulous about time markers throughout the novel's action, which makes a Sunday reference logical. There is no reason to think that Bulgakov would suddenly introduce religious categories he had so assiduously avoided up to this point
EPILOGUE
But stil], what happened next —die narrator who has been in and out of the novel is back with a vengeance, and echoes many famous nineteenth-century narrators—especially those of Dostoyevsky and Gogol. The final version of the epilogue was written not long before Bulgakov's death and was pasted in on the last page of the bound manuscript. Many have objected to the jarring dissonance of tone here, and wonder if Bulgakov would have kept the epilogue if he had lived. Since the epilogue brings the total number of chapters to the meaningful number of 33 (Christ's age at his death), it is very likely that Bulgakov would have kept it. The epilogue suddenly expands the time frame of the novel—some eight years have passed, judging by Iran's age. And Ivan is very much the point—the novel must come back to its beginning, and to the one person who could learn something of importance from the story of the Master and his Margarita.
cultured people —this use of "cultured" is equivalent to "educated people," and does not necessarily have anything to do with real culture. It is meant to distinguish the middle class from the hopeless vulgarians.
a hundred or so... were shot—although the subject is supposedly cats, it is hard not to see a political subtext here, since Bulgakov is writing during the terror.
Margarita... disappear from Moscow —this may or may not be an error, but it is certainly a myster)>—the reader has already read that Margarita died of a heart attack in her apartment.
Absolutely nothing happened to them —Bulgakov is slyly reminding the reader that some parts of the novel didn't happen, a deeply ironic enterprise.
Institute of History and Philosophy —in reality there was no such institution, but if there had been, Ivan would have been perfect for it, since the Pilate chapters and the Master's story belong to both these areas.
Ponyryov— only the second mention of Ivan's real last name, which has the associations of "dive" and "downcast."
Everything is clear to Ivan —a possible indication that he is a failed disciple: Ivan
360 Commentary
has accepted the rational explanations his world has provided him with, and he will never be an artist because of it.
the knight Pondus Pilate—the Saakyants text has a slight difference in phrasing between the ending of Chapter 32 and the Epilogue. The chief difference is that the name Pontius is spelled differently— Ponttiskit instead of Pontii. This matters because if the endings are different, and only one matches what the Master said the last words of his novel would be—and it is hard to believe that Bulgakov would not remember such an essential phrase—then only that one, specifically the ending to Chapter 32, is the real ending to the Master's novel. Yanovskaya stales that Bulgakov's own last text did end with the different form of Pontius, but that the author's widow, Elena Sergeevna, entered the change which made both the Epilogue and Chapter 32 end with identical words. For many reasons it makes sense that Chapter 32 is the end of the Master's work, and the Epilogue the end of Bulgakov's. This point, like so many other textual differences, will have to be left unresolved. In either case, it would be hard to convey such a difference in English— Pontian is the closest equivalent in English.
afterword: BULGAKOV the magician
Bulgakov the magician confidently steps out on the stage of a theater he has constructed himself and begins his performance. Its success depends on the successful implication of the audience itself. What the audience-reader notices in the exuberant, intricate extravaganza that is The Master and Margarita is how Bulgakov the magician spares no resources in his effort to make us believe—but on first reading we are left unsure of both his intentions and his beliefs. This is a very cinematic work, respecting no unities of geography or epoch, full of dazzling humor and startling shifts. At the end of this work we have been profoundly amused by both the situations and characters, but we have also been disturbed. In this afterword I will concentrate on the sources of that disturbance, not because it is more important than the buoyancy on display, but because its sources are harder to fathom.
Thanks to the work of numerous crides and scholars, we know much more now about Bulgakov's most famous novel than we did when it was first published in English. Bulgakov worked sporadically on different versions of The Masler and Margarita from 1928 up until 1940. The main text was completed in the summer of 1938, but Bulgakov continued making corrections up until a few months before his death. Although he had moments of thinking he might be able to get the novel published, most of the time Bulgakov wrote with full awareness that this novel would not be published in the foreseeable future. But Bulgakov was counting on the unforeseeable future—which caught up with him in 1966, twenty-six years after his death, when a censored version of the text was serialized in a Moscow journal. The Russian literary world was stunned by the unexpected transformation of a dramatist of the 1920s into a major novelist and an unnerving influence on the culture as a whole. To this day Russians use key phrases from the novel ("second-degree freshness"), and label certain kinds of banal-yet-mysterious events "Bulgakovian."
Throughout his career Bulgakov specialized in genre mutations: plays that were dreams, science fiction that was neither science nor fiction, adaptations that were actually original. So it is no surprise that The Master and Margarita is dense with mystery, ambiguity and irony, a subversive work which fits no genre neatly. The question of genre is essential to Bulgakov's magic: because we don't know what category this work belongs to, we don't know what expectations to bring to it. But it is a mark of the quality of this work that both the ignorant and initiated may find entertainment equally— it is not necessary to solve all the mysteries to enjoy The Master and Margarita.
Like the writers literary history has come to label modernists, Bulgakov is writing in the post-Einsteinean universe, and in many ways he fits the general profile of Anglo-American modernism. Because he is usually discussed as a Soviet writer, albeit an aberrant one, he is rarely placed in this context. Like the modernists, Bulgakov was inclined to parody the forms of the earlier masters, and in this novel he certainly uses myth to impose order of sort—only then to explode the myth itself. Like T. S. Eliot, Bulgakov had no desire to subvert traditional humanism—to the contrary, he longed to reestablish it in a country where it was held in contempt. But his art actually reveals the typical concerns of modernism, so it is not surprising that irony and ambiguity of motivation are central to The Master and Margarita. To some degree these approaches are present in earlier Russian writers, especially Dostoyevsky and Gogol, but Bulgakov adds truly modern anxiety: the knowledge that there is no stable society against which to rebel, there is only entropy, visible everywhere.
Bulgakov's narrator at first seems to promise an old-fashioned story. However, this narrator is as misleading as his style. Bulgakov's style demonstrates a remarkable abil-
362 Ellendea Proffer
ity to combine seemingly disparate elements, especially language levels, in such a way diät the reader accepts the whole as harmonious—although this style is not particularly smooth. This is rhythmic, musical prose, full of rich sound play, but it features unexpected words in unexpected order. The tendency to put the key word at the end of the sentence, often the verb, is quite un-Russian, but very Bulgakovian in that it creates suspense on the level of a phrase. This is nervous, modern prose. For all the ways in which it continues the classic themes of Russian literature, Bulgakov's novel lacks many of the elements we associate with that literature. No one has a childhood in The Master and Margarita, no one's character evolves profoundly over time, no souls are probed deeply. We are shown an adulterous love which appears to have no physical side to it. Nor is this the Gogolian world of grotesque "types," although Gogol is a major influence on Bulgakov (as well as a possible model for the Master). Very realistic minor characters intermingle with archetypal or deliberately abstract figures. The reader notices few of these things, so caught up is he in this strange narrative. The difficulty of this novel is partly due to something Bulgakov could never have envisioned: the role the postponement of his literary appearance would play in the critical reception of the novel, and the persistence of the biographical fallacy which would make many assume that the Master was merely a stand-in for the author, and therefore must be heroic. These two elements have clouded readers' visions from the novel's first appearance in 1967-68, and understandably so—Bulgakov was much more modern than anyone was prepared to see.
The first chapter is a good example of the playwright at work. When Berlioz, Ivan and Woland meet on the park bench, the major worlds of this novel meet. The discussion about theology which appears merely to be a pretext for Woland to make fun of the atheism of the two Soviet writers is, in fact, filled with clues to the author's intentions when telling the story of Pontius Pilate, but like Matvei and Ivan, the reader is unable to understand these clues until he has finished the novel. The themes touched on in this opening chapter—fate, the existence of God and the Devil, and Bezdomny's strange ability to write in a believable way about Jesus Christ—are part of the overture. Bulgakov's style in Russian in this chapter is brilliant and unconventional, his dialogue quickly characterizes the speakers, and nothing is irrelevant: a sus-penseful opening act.
The second chapter is something few readers are prepared for, especially after the humor of the first. The chapter is entitled "Pontius Pilate," so when we read the words "the accused is from Galilee?" we think we know what is coming, all of it colored by romantic irony. But this Yeshua is not (Aa/Jesus.just as this Woland is not that Satan. The style of the Pilate chapters, with its majestic rhetoric and almost transcendental irony, is the skin covering the muscle of Bulgakov's scholarship. These chapters are a tour de forte, and represent Bulgakov the mystificator at his most dazzling, as well as the amateur historian. While Bulgakov sprinkles parodistic echoes from the Gospels throughout the Moscow narrative, he scrupulously strips away everything that can be called messianic or mythic from the Pilate chapters, leaving us with a pitiful yet compelling Yeshua, who is historically plausible. Bulgakov then promptly undercuts this historical tendency by incorporating apocryphal material in what appears to be his straight historical narrative. There are many scholarly injokes here, a few of which I have mentioned in the Commentary.
Bulgakov's works as a whole, and what we know of his biography reveal him to be a believer in the need for religious feeling, but not necessarily an admirer of organized religion itself. Haifa is a typical religious figure for this author, who portrayed worldly, politicized priests in many of his works. It is not surprising that many Russian Orthodox readers consider this novel blasphemous. But Bulgakov, like Tolstoy, Man-
Afterword 363
delstam and many other artists of his time, was more interested in Christ than in the religion created in his name.
The Pilate chapters arc clearly included within the Moscow narrative for a reason, and there are certainly many stylistic and thematic parallels between them, but we are at first unable lo see the connection. We certainly notice the similar paradigm of teacher/failed disciple/betrayer in both plots, as well as myriad motifs which recur like operatic phrases. Displacement is pervasive: there are no last suppers, baptisms, or twelve disciples in the Pilate chapters, but these motifs are all to be found in parodie form in the Moscow strand.
The narrator's direct addresses to the reader at the most unexpected points of the story are part of the magician's diversion. This is a wildly unreliable narrator, an actor whose aims are as obscure as Woland's. But the author's aims are there for us to see if we look closely. Underneath the humor, fantasy, and deep lyrical sadness, is a philosophical structure. This structure is not meant to be perceived separately from what surrounds it, of course, but in order to reveal Bulgakov's main feat of magic here a bit of analysis is in order—always keeping in mind that he is not a philosopher or a scholar, no matter how well he impersonates one, but an artist
There are many questions which come to mind when reading this work. For example, why is the novel called The Master and Margarita when those two characters arrive very late in the narrative? What is Woland's real purpose in Moscow, and what does it have to do with Pontius Pilate? How many statements which the reader takes seriously are actually meant ironically? Are these simply loose ends, sloppy plotting? Bulgakov had finished the novel in terms of structure, but he would certainly have continued to coordinate the minor changes he began in the first part of the novel with the second part if he had lived. The changes he was in the process of making before he died were not substantive, and I doubt that they would have done anything to change the general impression that the two parts of the novel are quite different, the first seeming more concrete and dense, the second more abstract and fantastic. Before concluding that everything unclear or seemingly contradictory is a mistake, we have to look at the text more carefully.
One way to understand this work is to consider Bulgakov's other artist heroes. Dy-mogatsky, the dramatist in The Crimson Island, is appalled at what the censor and the director are doing to his play, but gives in; Molière, in the play of the same name, grovels before his king; the playwright in Theatrical Novel is unable to defend his play against the director; Pushkin in the play Last Days is humiliated by the Tsar. Consistently, Bulgakov's artist heroes feel themselves crushed by greater force. Their only salvation is the act of creation itself. Bulgakov himself was familiar with all of these humiliations, and his own worst compromise with his conscience was probably the writing of the play Batum, about Stalin as a young revolutionary.
The Master is a distillation of this line of somewhat autobiographical heroes: like them, he is naive about the likely reception of his work, and is unable to deal with the attacks of the critics. Unlike these other characters, the Master stops writing: he is completely broken by his encounter with both the critics and the police. The point is made that it is not his experiences, but rather his reaction lo them that is the problem, the fear itself. The Master is no conventional hero, he is barely characterized, his attitude to himself is sadly ironic (as when he shows his profile to Ivan, something Behemoth will do later in a gesture rhyme), and his novel is the only remarkable thing about him. But it is enough. It is the justification for his existence. Metafiction was characteristic of Bulgakov from the start of his career—fictionalized accounts of his
364 Eilenden Proffer
early attempts to be a writer, plays within plays, plays within novels, works about writers, or their analogues, creative scientists. Here in Bulgakov's last novel we have the writer's text itself, as separate from the surrounding narrative. The Pilate "novel" b revealed in many different ways and through different consciousnesses, as if it were an ur-text waiting to be discovered—but it is clearly the Master's work, and meant to be understood as such, judging by all of the internal indicators, no matter how it is presented. That the chapters are scattered throughout the larger narrative means that once again the reader is implicated. The reader's consciousness must provide the coherence between widely spaced sections, remembering details, and, most of all, wanting to know how this story, so familiar yet so new, will develop.
The only real characterization of the Master is to be found in his creation, a point generally overlooked. The Master as author does not appear to be interested in the fantastic, but rather the political and the psychological. The Master approaches the New Testament as literature rather than revelation, and proceeds to rewrite it in a way which makes better sense to him. The dialectic implicit in the contradictory world-views of Yeshua ("All men are good") and Pilate ("All men are bad," with "including myself" understood) is never resolved. The tension between these points of view continues into the outer novel, as the two protagonists ascend the moon path, still arguing. Throughout this narrative the emphasis is on the fact that Yeshua is extraordinary only in his sensitivity and his naive belief in the goodness of man. It is a defenseless human being who is beaten and hung on the cross, not the Messiah. We know that the Master, like Woland, was a historian in his former life, and his novel certainly demonstrates this. The Master has taken what is normally perceived as religious material and given it a social context; his novel is not about Jesus Christ and His divinity as revealed by His time on earth, but about the unseen forces of politics and morality which lead to the death of a historically plausible figure—and the creation of the myth which will be the basis of a major world religion. If we try to comprehend the Master through his novel, we must conclude that he is essentially a pessimist. A case can be made, using only his text, that while wishing that Yeshua were right about humanity, he ultimately agrees with Pilate. In addition to the text of his novel, we have the Master's story of his love affair, a strange blend of ironic cliché and real emotion, and later, when things are going badly for him, he and Margarita appear to grow apart. We are given two other facts about the Master which are more important than they might at first seem: he can't remember his first wife's name, and he got his start as a writer by a remarkable turn of luck—he won the lottery. Fate—or Woland—provided him with the possibility of creating his novel, but he himself must rise to the challenge the critical reception poses. Unlike virtually everyone else in the novel, the Master guesses right away that Woland is the devil, but he nevertheless demonstrates little understanding of Woland's function, or of what is taking place. And what is taking place? A drama of identity, a recognition plot.
When the novel opens, we read the epigraph from Faust and we make at least two assumptions: first, that there will be something Faust-like in this novel; second, that the epigraph is meant seriously. As we read on, we are barraged by allusions to Faust, sometimes to the opera (which Bulgakov saw over forty times), sometimes to Goethe's poem, sometimes to the original sources. Bulgakov has gone to a lot of trouble to lead us to the conclusion that Woland's role is identical to that of Mephistopheles. By this time a fellow magician would know the main trick is being readied. These allusions are so distracting that we forget to ask: is Woland really Mephistopheles, is he really the embodiment of the force opposed to good? As the novel continues, we see that his role is quite dissimilar. We are comfortably superior to Ivan and Berlioz, as they fail to recognize the very literary figure who is telling them the story of Pontius Pilate, but
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