The Master and Margarita

I took a break from reading 1Q84 (which I'm about a third of the way through now) to finish up this book I found used back in an Oakland bookstore the night that Justin coerced me into going bike riding with him. I have this random thing for Slavic books now after Dostoevsky and the two Slavic lit classes I took for the series humanities requirement at Berkeley, so when I randomly came across this on a bookshelf it drew my attention.

The basic premise is that the devil, known here as Woland, shows up one day in 20th century atheistic Soviet-era Moscow with a retinue of supernatural folks (including a pretty awesome talking and walking black cat named Behemoth... who in my mind while reading didn't look anything like the cat pictured on the cover) and wreaks havoc. Technically there's also two other storylines intertwined with this- the first, a secular retelling of the weekend of the Crucifixion from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, and the second, the effect that Satan's adventures have on the love story between the titular couple: the Master, an author who has been persecuted for writing a novel about Pontius Pilate (which is strongly suggested to be the former storyline), and Margarita, a woman who he has an affair with. But the couple from the latter plotline don't really show up for a third of the book, and for all we know the book could've just been a bildungsroman about Ivan Bezdomny, the young poet who first encounters Satan and goes insane for it. Basically a lot's going on in this book.

This book was a lot easier to read than say, Gravity's Rainbow (although you could probably say that about most books), and the plot itself isn't hard to follow, but at the same time it was hard to tell what the general purpose or theme was at a first glance since a lot of it seemed so nonsensical. A lot of crazy stuff happens that's treated somewhat like a natural occurrence even though it isn't - I would point to the NSFW pictures on the internet associated with this book of two naked women flying through the sky on a broomstick and a giant pig as an example... It makes sense if you read it. After One Hundred Years of Solitude I found out that the proper term for this is magical realism (or as according to Wiki: "a genre where magical elements are a natural part of an otherwise mundane environment"). 

I don't think I quite got what the purpose of magical realism was until this book, though. Soviet Russia obviously is a rather perfectly mundane setting for the kinds of acts that happen, and if you go into it knowing that it's a satire of the social/cultural conditions of the Soviet era in the early 20th century, you get the sense that the author is trying to vent about all of his personal issues with that culture. Every humorous and farcical act in this book seems to be making fun of the snobby literary elite class, whether it be from their being placed at the mercy of a being they don't believe in, Satan, or the stupidity of their reactions to the magical and supernatural acts happening in front of them, or the fact that the magical disappearance of some of them from their apartments is considered somewhat normal because hey, sometimes people disappear in Soviet Russia. 

It gets to be pretty slapstick humor-wise- not enough to make me laugh out loud while reading, but it's still fairly entertaining to see how the situation unfolds. It's a fun read - although if you're not familiar with aspects of Soviet culture and the references made it can be hard to appreciate; even after finishing the book, I couldn't quite see why some folks would deign to call it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

It turns out that there's a lot more to this book than just silly antics and poking fun at Soviet culture. 

[spoilers follow - from this point on, it's less review and more analysis]

The Pilate narratives, in contrast to Satan's romp through Moscow, are rather serious and detached from from the supernatural aspects of their Biblical context. The Jesus (or rather, Yeshua Ha-Notsri) portrayed here seems just like an ordinary man, although granted a spiritual teacher who Pilate finds some affinity with, but gets persecuted out of a rumor or mistake and winds up caught up in a flow that the procurator finds himself helpless to stop. Although he does what little he can to alleviate the situation, Pilate eventually sends Yeshua to his death anyway in order to appease the crowds and keep in line with authority, and at the end of it all is wracked with a guilt for his complicity in Jesus' death that continues to plague him past death for two millenia. I didn't realize it until reading the afterword and other sources online, but there's an intended parallel here between Pilate and the general populace in Soviet Russia, a people who are negatively affected by the Soviet system but are also in part guilty or complicit for allowing it to continue flourishing out of fear for their own survival. 

Essentially Bulgakov is targeting cowardice itself, as pointed out later in the Pilate narratives:

Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!'

Cowardice is also one of the major vices that the Master struggles with. His experiences echo those of Bulgakov's himself - in the process of trying to write his life's greatest work (the novel about Pilate almost standing in for The Master and Margarita itself), wrestling with the fear or doubt that the work would ever be published; undergoing intense persecution and ridicule upon getting published for daring to speak out or against the status quo; and giving up on his work by burning his manuscripts (the first manuscript of this novel was apparently burned by Bulgakov himself also). The course of the novel aims towards the redemption, or freedom, of both the Master and Pilate from their guilt and their fears, which ironically is in part carried out with the help of Satan himself. 

There's a Faustian element to Satan's role in all of this (what with Satan's first appearance being to a scholar) that underscores the work. As the commentary in the back of my book mentions, his portrayal in both works points towards a Manichean dualistic point of view, where rather than light being greater than dark, the two sides are seen as equals, two cardinal principles of the world, where one cannot exist without the other. Woland himself has a little speech towards the end on this:

What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light? You are a fool.

Ironically, throughout the story he acts less evil and devilish and more like a judge with an odd sense of humor. At first it seems as though he targets the Muscovites indiscriminately, but as the chaos progresses and the Master and Margarita enter the picture, it becomes more apparent that Woland is actively punishing people who exhibit greed or other personal vices, whereas he rewards Margarita after seeing her enact an act of compassion for a suffering woman. If anything, the antics pulled off by Satan and his retinue seem more geared towards determining whether such good qualities can still exist in an otherwise evil populace. In contrast with the Pilate narratives, the adventures of Satan in Moscow also feature a bunch of hidden allusions to scenes from the Bible itself: Ivan Bezdomny's accidental "baptism" in the river while chasing after Woland's crew; the [un]holy Trinity represented by Woland, his first companion Koroviev, and the cat Behemoth; the 12 literary figures seated around the table at Griboyedov House as a figurative Last Supper; the plate serving Berlioz's severed head in the same fashion as was done with John the Baptist; and more. 

This novel in a sense is Bulgakov's reaction to the dominant thought in the Soviet society of his time: that atheism is the next logical step for society and that the time for spirituality and religion has passed. It brings up the question of the cost that such a choice brings, after observing the loss of personal ethics and responsibility in the people of Moscow in the process, while attempting to reinvigorate their society with a sense of awe for the magical and supernatural through the use of magical realism and drawing attention back to the Biblical past. 

It's telling how significant was the impact that censorship had on this novel, considering that Bulgakov was plagued with the concern that it would never be published while he wrote it (and he died before finishing final revisions on the second half), and in fact it didn't receive any attention until twenty years years after his death when censorship restrictions had lapsed. Unlike the Master, Bulgakov at least managed to overcome his personal fears and finished his work, which is a testament to the strength of its message- about the goodness that still exists in people, and the courage that it often takes to express that freely in the face of oppression.