The Master and Margarita—Mikhail Bulgakov

“Nyaaa, what’s all the hubbub, Bub?” —Bugs Bunny

Sorry about the archival post last week, but I had the devil of a time making sense out of The Master and Margarita. Published in censored form in 1966 and 1967, then in its first complete version in 1973, and in another completer version in 1989, the manuscript actually started its first life in 1928. Bulgakov burned it in 1930 and began reconstructing it the following year. He finished the second draft in 1936. He stopped working on it in 1940, just a few weeks before he died. So, who knows what Bulgakov intended? I do know that I read a wicked book last week entitled The Master and Margarita.

Despite its title, this novel has not just one main plot, but three. Besides the Master and Margarita finding, losing, and regaining each other, Satan visits Moscow, and Pontius Pilate executes Jesus. I don’t think of any one of these plots as a subplot, since they each carry a lot of weight. This created for me a sort of literary version of the three-body problem, namely, unpredictable chaos. I thought I knew how the Jesus story went, but then the Master starts messing with it. What then? I thought I could foresee the trajectory of the love story, but then the Master goes insane and Margarita becomes the queen of Satan’s ball. Now what?

Let’s start with this. The Master (whose name we never learn) has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, but the Soviet literary powers have not allowed its publication. That manuscript becomes a novel within this novel, and in it things don’t quite follow the apostolic version of the crucifixion. Margarita meets the Master and falls in love with him and with his manuscript. Meanwhile, Satan has decided to adopt the name of Professor Woland and to visit Moscow to see what has become of its people since his last visit, centuries before. Each of these plots, believe it or not, intersects with and influences the others.

The love story—at least until Woland gets involved—has a conventional plot. A well-to-do woman, bored with her married life, meets a poor writer and they carry on an affair. The story of the crucifixion, while differing from the Gospels—Jesus has only one disciple, Judas gets murdered, Pilate has serious qualms—also gets a pretty straightforward treatment. While Bulgakov handles the stories of Pilate and of the Master in a realistic and even somber style, everything involving Woland reads like something out of the Looney Tunes. From the moment Woland arrives in town, pandemonium ensues. He wants to observe the people, not individuals, so he rents a theater and puts on a magic show in order to gather a large group in one place. Among other stunts at this show, he makes thousands of ten-ruble notes fall from the ceiling and he watches the audience members fight each other for them. Then he offers perfume, shoes, Parisian fashions for the ladies and he watches them mob the stage. That seems to be all he wanted to see (not terribly funny in itself) but the humor to my way of thinking comes from the show’s aftermath. The magic money and the magic clothes have limited lifespans. Oops! Before you know it, the street outside the theater soon gets filled with naked women. The police show up. Some people go crazy. Some people get arrested. The chaos on the street spreads as people escape in taxis and trains, but all those who accept the money as payment soon find themselves holding scraps of blank paper. The repercussions of the magic show continue all the way to the end of the novel. But all of that only scratches the surface of the craziness.

Bulgakov references a lot of other literature, most obviously Goethe’s Faust, but he also creates scenes that movie directors have borrowed. For instance, at one point during the magic show, Woland’s assistant magically compels audience members to start singing a popular Russian folk song against their will. One person after another joins in until the whole theater rocks. This same sort of musical possession got used more recently in Beetlejuice (1988) and again in The Mask (1994). Makes me laugh every time.

One stylistic quirk that bothered me a lot started with the first paragraph.

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled red hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

This paragraph presents two “citizens” and gives us a detailed physical description of each person. Only in the second paragraph do we learn their names. I thought nothing of it at first, but time after time, throughout the novel, we get descriptions first and names only later—sometimes many paragraphs later, and sometimes (as with the Master) never at all. That mannerism eventually started to annoy me. Like a socially inept co-worker who greets everyone with “Guess what?” instead of “Good morning,” Bulgakov makes me want to snap, “Stop trying to mystify me every time someone walks into the room, will you?”

Well, when authors do something bothersome, you’ve got two ways of responding. You could blame them for screwing up, or you could try to understand what makes their choice just right. The first approach, the most natural one, feels good but leaves you smug, superior, and unchanged. The second approach, the harder one, forces you to grow a little bit. So, when I finally got my fill of grumbling about this annoying mannerism of Bulgakov’s, I asked myself why I kept expecting to learn a character’s name before learning what he or she looked like.

It occurred to me that omniscient narrators often establish their omniscience by telling us something we could never know about the characters just from appearances, and that something most often means their names. Narrators also tell us things about the character’s past or lineage that would never come out in the first few words of a normal conversation. But the name often comes first, and so we expect this in short stories or novels. But in theater, the first time a character strides onto the stage, we usually know nothing about them but what we can see. What I had first thought of as Bulgakov’s quirky treatment of new characters I realized creates the effect of the characters making an entrance, rather than getting introduced. It gives them an independence, like the actor’s physical presence on the stage as distinct from the fictionality of the character they play. Once I realized this, the beginning of the second paragraph made perfect sense:

The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz...

When I recognized the theatrical feel to the novel, I understood other things as well. A lot of its humor comes from how every event has a ripple effect. Every incident, even if it appears insignificant, gets remembered, recounted, investigated, distorted, or explained away, sometimes more than once. Every character, no matter how minor, reappears later. This strikes me as “Chekhov’s gun,” carried to an extreme: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall,” Chekhov advised would-be playwrights, “then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Novels tend to meander with countless details introduced for an effect and then dropped, but the artistic inspiration of this novel seems more theatrical.

Along the same lines, I thought one of the funniest touches occurred in the epilogue. Years after the events of the novel, the police still continue investigating the craziness, absolutely determined to demystify all that happened that night, and those who actually experienced the supernatural still try to rationalize everything away. No one ever admits that the Devil had paid them a visit.

I’ve left out so much of this madcap novel. I haven’t even mentioned the most famous character, Behemoth, the sarcastic, talking black cat, big as a hog, who walks upright on his hind legs. Or Koroviev, Behemoth’s comic partner. The two of them play off of each other like Abbott and Costello. Or Hella, the sexy vampire. Or Azazello, the fanged, wall-eyed assassin.

Once I started thinking of this novel as Dr. Zhivago meets Bugs Bunny, I enjoyed it immensely. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure that out.

§ § §

Thank you, dear reader, for spending some of your valuable time with these musings. I know that other Substackers have a far more organized approach than I do, allowing them to plan out their literary conquests a year or more in advance. Some of them offer great advice on how you too can become your own professor by just following their curriculum—for a price. I don’t do that. I can’t and I won’t. I just want to read great literature, glean whatever I can from it, and share what excites me with all my friends. Few thrills can surpass the frisson of reading a work of literary genius—except possibly listening to a work of musical genius, or reveling in a work of artistic genius, or …

If you already subscribe to the Decade Project, thank you. If not, please consider doing so. Consider also sharing with friends. And most importantly, share your thoughts with me and other subscribers in the comments section. I really enjoy hearing from you, and I would love to see a conversation between subscribers emerge.

I can’t confidently predict which of the following works I’ll write about first: The Seagull (Chekhov, tr. Brodskaya), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy, tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky), or Volume 1 of The Mahabharata (anonymous, tr. Debroy). Rest assured, though, I’ll write about each of them soon enough.

Works mentioned in this post

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, tr. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, tr. by Marina Brodskaya

The Mahabharata, anonymous, tr. by Bibek Debroy

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, tr. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Faust I and II, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, tr. by Barker Fairley

The Mask, directed by Chuck Russsell

Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton