Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Having written a somewhat contentious little book called Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005), I wish now I could revise the part on the New Testament, because David Bentley Hart has changed my mind on some things, particularly on Paul. To be absurdly anachronistic, I wish Mikhail Bulgakov had read Hart’s The New Testament. Still, that might not have much affected the Master in his leisurely gavotte with Yeshua and Pilate. Since the Master is and is not Bulgakov, we can accept that Yeshua is not Yeshua or Pilate, Pilate. David Bethea, as always, is prompt on such parody:

  Yet its essence remains indeterminate. Reflective of both a nineteenth-century tradition of realism and fierce ethical commitment and a twentieth-century tradition of post-symbolism and destabilizing irony, the novel seems a kind of marvelous stone that with each stroke of the critic’s blade reveals a new facet but that for this very reason can never be apprehended in the totality of its lapidary brilliance. That Bulgakov managed to encode elaborate parodies of the Bible story and Goethe’s Faust in his novel is by now critical commonplace; that the fate of his hero and of his hero’s manuscript is in many ways a fictionalization—even up to the point of that manuscript’s secret vitality after its author’s death—of Bulgakov’s life with and through his novel has been corroborated by Marietta Chudakova’s seminal research and commented on elsewhere as well. Thus, with its deep interest in questions of good and evil (à la Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) meshed with an exceedingly complex structure (the baldly “realistic” inner text ramifying into a diabolically playful outer text suggests parallels not only with Hamlet’s play-within-a-play but also with Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs and several of Nabokov’s novels), The Master and Margarita might legitimately be called the Soviet-Russian “modern” novel par excellence, an artistic first among a large group of artistically lackluster equals.

  I find Bethea’s comparison with Prince Hamlet’s play-within-a-play more stimulating than Gide or even Nabokov in this context. Nabokov’s master Gogol fits better. Bulgakov adapted Dead Souls for production by Stanislavski in 1932. Hamlet revises The Murder of Gonzago into The Mousetrap to catch Claudius, incestuous usurper and murderer. But, being Hamlet, keenest of Western consciousnesses, he himself usurps the entire play from Shakespeare and makes it into a series of plays-within-plays-within-plays. Bulgakov is appetizingly crazy, but Hamlet is crazier than you are, whoever you are. As I read and teach the play again and again, increasingly I confound the Prince of Denmark with David, King of Jerusalem, and with the original Yeshua of the weird Gospel of Mark. That Yeshua does not know who he is or what he is going to be, and only the demons are able to recognize him for whatever it is he will become.

  Bulgakov’s Ophelia is the much livelier and more fortunate Margarita:

  Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue!

  Follow me, reader, and only me and I will show you that love!

  The master was wrong when he told Ivan with such bitterness, in the hospital that hour before midnight, that she had forgotten him. It was impossible. Of course she had not forgotten him.

  First let us reveal the secret that the master refused to tell Ivan. His beloved mistress was called Margarita Nikolayevna. Everything the master said about her to the wretched poet was the strict truth. She was beautiful and clever. It is also true that many women would have given anything to change places with Margarita Nikolayevna. Thirty years old and childless, Margarita was married to a brilliant scientist, whose work was of national importance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind, honest and he adored his wife. Margarita Nikolayevna and her husband lived alone in the whole of the top floor of a delightful house in a garden on one of the side streets near the Arbat. It was a charming place. You can see for yourself whenever you feel like having a look. Just ask me and I’ll tell you the address and how to get there; the house is standing to this day.

  Margarita Nikolayevna was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared apartment. In short…was she happy? Not for a moment. Since the age of nineteen, when she had married and moved into her house, she had never been happy. Good God! What more did the woman need? Why did her eyes always glow with a strange fire? What else did she want, that witch with a very slight squint in one eye, who always decked herself with mimosa every spring? I don’t know. Obviously she was right when she said she needed him, the master, instead of a Gothic house, instead of a private garden, instead of money. She was right—she loved him.

  Even I, the truthful narrator, yet a mere onlooker, feel a pang when I think what Margarita went through when she came back to the master’s basement the next day (fortunately she had not been able to talk to her husband, who failed to come home at the time arranged) and found that the master was not there. She did everything she could to discover where he might be, but in vain. Then she returned home and took up her old life.

  In the new life, again the Master’s mistress, the ebullient Margarita becomes a witch flying through the air on a broomstick, a guise also adopted by her former maid Natasha. By a pact with the devil, she becomes the hostess of his annual grand ball, greeting a splendid array of poisoners and similar malefactors:

  By now people were advancing from below like a phalanx bent on assaulting the landing where Margarita stood. The naked women mounting the staircase between the tail-coated and white-tied men floated up in a spectrum of colored bodies that ranged from white through olive, copper and coffee to quite black. In hair that was red, black, chestnut or flaxen, sparks flashed from precious stones. Diamond-studded orders glittered on the jackets and shirt fronts of the men. Incessantly Margarita felt the touch of lips to her knee, incessantly she offered her hand to be kissed, her face stretched into a rigid mask of welcome.

  “Charmed,” Koroviev would monotonously intone, “we are charmed…her majesty is charmed.”

  “Her majesty is charmed,” came a nasal echo from Azazello, standing behind her.

  “I am charmed!” squeaked the cat.

  “Madame la marquise,” murmured Koroviev, “poisoned her father, her two brothers and two sisters for the sake of an inheritance…Her majesty is delighted, Madame Minkin!…Ah, how pretty she is! A trifle nervous, though. Why did she have to burn her maid with a pair of curling irons? Of course, in the way she used them it was bound to be fatal….Her majesty is charmed!…Look, your majesty—the Emperor Rudolf—magician and alchemist…Another alchemist—he was hanged….Ah, there she is! What a magnificent brothel she used to keep in Strasbourg!…We are delighted, madame!…That woman over there was a Moscow dressmaker who had the brilliantly funny idea of boring two peepholes in the wall of her fitting-room…”

  “And didn’t her lady clients know?” inquired Margarita.

  “Of course, they all knew, your majesty,” replied Koroviev. “Charmed!…That young man over there was a dreamer and an eccentric from childhood. A girl fell in love with him and he sold her to a brothel keeper….”

  On and on poured the stream from below. Its source—the huge fireplace—showed no sign of drying up. An hour passed, then another. Margarita felt her chain weighing more and more. Something odd was happening to her hand: she found she could not lift it without wincing. Koroviev’s remarks ceased to interest her. She could no longer distinguish between slant-eyed Mongol faces, white faces and black faces. They all merged into a blur, and the air between them seemed to be quivering. A sudden sharp pain like a needle stabbed at Margarita’s right hand, and clenching her teeth she leaned her elbow on the little pedestal. A sound like the rustling of wings came from the rooms behind her as the horde of guests danced, and Margarita could feel the massive floors of marble, crystal and mosaic pulsating rhythmically.

  Margarita showed as little interest in the Emperor Caius C
aligula and Messalina as she did in the rest of the procession of kings, dukes, knights, suicides, poisoners, gallows birds, procuresses, jailers, card sharpers, hangmen, informers, traitors, madmen, detectives and seducers. Her head swam with their names, their faces merged into a great blur, and only one face remained fixed in her memory—that of Malyuta Skuratov with his fiery beard. Margarita’s legs were buckling, and she was afraid that she might burst into tears at any moment. The worst pain came from her right knee, which all the guests had kissed. It was swollen, and the skin had turned blue in spite of Natasha’s constant attention to it with a sponge soaked in fragrant ointment. By the end of the third hour Margarita glanced wearily down and saw with a start of joy that the flood of guests was thinning out.

  “Every ball is the same, your majesty,” whispered Koroviev. “At about this time the arrivals begin to decrease. I promise you that this torture will not last more than a few minutes longer. Here comes a party of witches from the Brocken—they’re always the last to arrive. Yes, there they are. And a couple of drunken vampires…is that all? Oh, no, there’s one more—no, two more.”

  The last two guests mounted the staircase. “Now this is someone new,” said Koroviev, peering through his monocle. “Oh, yes, now I remember. Azazello called on him once and advised him, over a glass of brandy, how to get rid of a man who was threatening to denounce him. So he made a friend, who was under an obligation to him, spray the other man’s office walls with poison.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Margarita.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” said Koroviev. “You’d better ask Azazello.”

  “And who’s that with him?”

  “That’s his friend who did the job. Delighted to welcome you!” cried Koroviev to the last two guests.

  The staircase was empty, and although the reception committee waited a little longer to make sure, no one else appeared from the fireplace.

  A second later, half-fainting, Margarita found herself beside the pool again, where, bursting into tears from the pain in her arm and leg, she collapsed to the floor. Hella and Natasha comforted her, doused her in blood and massaged her body until she revived again.

  “Once more, Queen Margot,” whispered Koroviev. “You must make the round of the ballrooms just once more to show our guests that they are not being neglected.”

  Again Margarita floated away from the pool. In place of Johann Strauss’s orchestra the stage behind the wall of tulips had been taken over by a jazz band of frenetic apes. An enormous gorilla with shaggy sideburns and holding a trumpet was leaping clumsily up and down as he conducted. Orangutan trumpeters sat in the front row, each with a chimpanzee accordionist on his shoulders. Two baboons with manes like lions’ were playing the piano, their efforts completely drowned by the roaring, squeaking and banging of the saxophones, violins and drums played by troops of gibbons, mandrills and marmosets. Innumerable couples circled round the glassy floor with amazing dexterity, a mass of bodies moving lightly and gracefully as one. Live butterflies fluttered over the dancing horde, flowers drifted down from the ceiling. The electric light had been turned out, the capitals of the pillars were now lit by myriads of glowworms, and will-o’-the-wisps danced through the air.

  One wants to appreciate this with a “bravo, bravi!” And certainly Margarita is almost equal to the amiable occasion. Still, it does not captivate me. If someone invites me to dinner and gives me only an enormous bar of chocolate-covered halvah, does that suffice? Fun is fun, and too much fun is not funny. Am I being ungrateful? Possibly in Russian The Master and Margarita can sustain endless rereadings. In translation, over-absorption troubles me. Mikhail Bulgakov is not Nikolai Gogol, but I wish he were even more Gogolian, like the finicky Vladimir Nabokov in his final Russian novel, The Gift (1952). Except for that parodistic fantasia, and for the immortal Pale Fire (1962), I have never been very happy with the lepidopterist and chess master. And yet I admire Nabokov, émigré Russian to the core, for being so free of Slavic piousness. Gogol was literally and sublimely crazy, and so is his fanatic religiosity, but, as by everything else in him, we are swept away. Mikhail Bulgakov cannot do that to me, though doubtless my own mix of Judaism and Gnosticism is the blocking agent.

  * * *

  —

  Essentially, Gnosticism, of whatever variety, begins with the vision that the Creation and the Fall were one event only. Our world is ruled by an Archon, or Demiurge, who disordered the cosmos even more thoroughly. Ancient and modern Gnosticism alike distinguish between psyche and pneuma, Self and Soul. You might call Gnosticism the ultimate origin of the Romantic tradition in Western literature.

  The Master’s story of Pilate and Yeshua is hardly Eastern Orthodoxy and might be called Bulgakov’s personal gnosis:

  Approximately at midnight, sleep finally took pity on the hegemon. With a spasmodic yawn, the procurator unfastened and threw off his cloak, removed the belt girded over his shirt, with a broad steel knife in a sheath, placed it on the chair by his couch, took off his sandals, and stretched out. Banga got on the bed at once and lay down next to him, head to head, and the procurator, placing his hand on the dog’s neck, finally closed his eyes. Only then did the dog also fall asleep.

  The couch was in semi-darkness, shielded from the moon by a column, but a ribbon of moonlight stretched from the porch steps to the bed. And once the procurator lost connection with what surrounded him in reality, he immediately set out on the shining road and went up it straight towards the moon. He even burst out laughing in his sleep from happiness, so wonderful and inimitable did everything come to be on the transparent, pale blue road. He walked in the company of Banga, and beside him walked the wandering philosopher. They were arguing about something very complex and important, and neither of them could refute the other. They did not agree with each other in anything, and that made their argument especially interesting and endless. It went without saying that today’s execution proved to be a sheer misunderstanding: here this philosopher, who had thought up such an incredibly absurd thing as that all men are good, was walking beside him, therefore he was alive. And, of course, it would be terrible even to think that one could execute such a man. There had been no execution! No execution! That was the loveliness of this journey up the stairway of the moon.

  There was as much free time as they needed, and the storm would come only towards evening, and 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!

  (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky)

  For the first time, I quote a version other than the Glenny. I cannot judge which is more reliable. Yet I am astonishingly moved by this passage, and wonder if I have been inattentive to the dark situation that Mikhail Bulgakov and the Master had to confront. As David Bethea observes, all-powerful Woland is akin to all-powerful Stalin, except that Woland is so often benign, particularly in regard to Margarita and the Master. Bulgakov passes severe judgment upon himself by finding the final Limbo of calm and not the Eternity of light. That seems much too severe. He stubbornly resisted becoming a Stalinist mouthpiece and he suffered for it, though not as did the great Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, who died of privation at forty-seven en route to Siberian exile.

  Riding out of Moscow back to their presumable Hades, Woland and his three male subordinates become the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

  The storm had passed and a rainbow had arched itself across the sky, its foot in the Moscow River. On top of a hill between two clumps of trees could be seen three dark silhouettes. Woland, Koroviev and Behemoth sat mounted on black horses, looking at the city spread out beyond the river with fragments of sun glittering from thousands of west-facing windows, and at the onion domes of the Novodevichy monastery.

  There was a rustling in the air and Azazello, followed in a black cavalcade by the master and Margarita, landed by
the group of waiting figures.

  “I’m afraid we had to frighten you a little, Margarita Nikolayevna, and you, master,” said Woland after a pause. “But I don’t think you will have cause to complain to me about it or regret it. Now—” he turned to the master—“say good-bye to this city. It’s time for us to go.” Woland pointed his hand in its black gauntlet toward where countless glass suns glittered beyond the river, where above those suns the city exhaled the haze, smoke and vapor of the day.

  The master leaped from his saddle, left his companions and ran to the hillside, black cloak flapping above the ground behind him. He looked at the city. For the first few moments a tremor of sadness crept over his heart, but it soon changed to a delicious excitement, the gypsy’s thrill of the open road.

  “Forever…I must think what that means,” whispered the master and licked his dry, cracked lips. He began to listen to what was happening in his heart. His excitement, it seemed to him, had given way to a profound and grievous sense of hurt. But it was only momentary and gave place to one of proud indifference and finally to a presentiment of eternal peace.