by Viv Groskop
The final joke of the book is that maybe Satan is not the bad guy after all. While I was trying to recover my sense of humour about being Polish and Jewish instead of being Russian, this was all a great comfort. Life is, in Bulgakov’s eyes, a great cosmic joke. Of course, there’s a political message here, too. But Bulgakov delivers it with such gusto and playfulness that you never feel preached at. You have got to be a seriously good satirist in order to write a novel where the Devil is supposed to represent Stalin and/or Soviet power without making the reader feel you are bludgeoning them over the head with the idea. Bulgakov’s novel is tragic and poignant in many ways, but this feeling sneaks up on you only afterwards. Most of all, Bulgakov is about conjuring up a feeling of fun. Perhaps because of this he’s the cleverest and most subversive of all the writers who were working at this time. It’s almost impossible to believe that he and Pasternak were contemporaries, so different are their novels in style and tone. (Pasternak was born in 1890, Bulgakov in 1891.) The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago feel as if they were written in two different centuries.
Unlike Pasternak, though, Bulgakov never experienced any reaction to his novel during his lifetime, as it wasn’t published until after he had died. One of the things that makes The Master and Margarita so compelling is the circumstances in which it was written. Bulgakov wrote it perhaps not only ‘for the drawer’ (i.e. not to be published within his lifetime) but never to be read by anyone at all. He was writing it at a time of Black Marias (the KGB’s fleet of cars), knocks on the door and disappearances in the middle of the night. Ordinary life had been turned on its head for most Muscovites, and yet they had to find a way to keep on living and pretending that things were normal. Bulgakov draws on this and creates a twilight world where nothing is as it seems and the fantastical, paranormal and downright evil are treated as everyday occurrences.
It’s hard to imagine how Bulgakov would have survived if the novel had been released. Bulgakov must have known this when he was writing it. And he also must have known that it could never be published – which means that he did not hold back and wrote exactly what he wanted, without fear of retribution. (Although there was always the fear that the novel would be discovered. Just to write it would have been a crime, let alone to attempt to have it published.) This doesn’t mean that he in any way lived a carefree life. He worried about being attacked by the authorities. He worried about being prevented from doing any work that would earn him money. He worried about being unable to finish this novel. And he worried incessantly – and justifiably – about his health.
During his lifetime Bulgakov was known for his dystopian stories ‘The Fatal Eggs’ (1924) and ‘The Heart of a Dog’ (1925) and his play The Days of the Turbins (1926), about the civil war. Despite his early success, from his late twenties onwards, Bulgakov seemed to live with an awareness that he was probably going to be cut down in mid-life. He wrote a note to himself on the manuscript of The Master and Margarita: ‘Finish it before you die.’ J. A. E. Curtis’s compelling biography Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries, gives a near-cinematic insight into the traumatic double life Bulgakov was leading as he wrote the novel in secrecy. I love this book with the same intensity that I love The Master and Margarita. Curtis’s quotes from the letters and the diaries bring Bulgakov to life and are packed full of black comedy and everyday detail, from Bulgakov begging his brother not to send coffee and socks from Paris because ‘the duty has gone up considerably’ to his wife’s diary entry from New Year’s Day 1937 which tells of Bulgakov’s joy at smashing cups with 1936 written on them.
As well as being terrified that he would never finish The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov was becoming increasingly ill. In 1934, he wrote to a friend that he had been suffering from insomnia, weakness and ‘finally, which was the filthiest thing I have ever experienced in my life, a fear of solitude, or to be more precise, a fear of being left on my own. It’s so repellent that I would prefer to have a leg cut off.’ He was often in physical pain with a kidney disease but was just as tortured psychologically. There was the continual business of seeming to be offered the chance to travel abroad, only for it to be withdrawn. Of course, the authorities had no interest in letting him go, in case he never came back. (Because it would make them look bad if talented writers didn’t want to live in the USSR. And because it was much more fun to keep them in their own country, attempt to get them to write things praising Soviet power and torture them, in most cases literally.)
It is extraordinary that Bulgakov managed to write a novel that is so full of humour and wit and lightness of tone when he was living through this period. He grew accustomed to being in a world where sometimes the phone would ring, he would pick it up and on the other end of the line an anonymous official would say something like: ‘Go to the Foreign Section of the Executive Committee and fill in a form for yourself and your wife.’ He would do this and grow cautiously hopeful. And then, instead of an international passport, he would receive a slip of paper that read: ‘M. A. Bulgakov is refused permission.’ In all the years that Bulgakov continued, secretly, to write The Master and Margarita – as well as making a living (of sorts) as a playwright – what is ultimately surprising is that he did not go completely insane from all the cat-and-mouse games that Stalin and his acolytes played with him. Stalin took a personal interest in him, in the same way he did with Akhmatova. There’s some suggestion that his relationship with Stalin prevented Bulgakov’s arrest and execution. But it also prevented him from being able to work on anything publicly he wanted to work on.
How galling, too, to have no recognition in your own lifetime for your greatest work. When the book did come out in 1966–7, its significance was immense, perhaps greater than any other book published in the twentieth century. As the novelist Viktor Pelevin once said, it’s almost impossible to explain to anyone who has not lived through Soviet life exactly what this novel meant to people. ‘The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet, yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.’
The Master and Margarita symbolizes dissidence; it’s a wry acknowledgement that bad things happened that can never, ever be forgiven. But it is also representative of an interesting kind of passivity or non-aggression. It is not a novel that encourages revolution. It is a novel that throws its hands up in horror but does not necessarily know what to do next. Literature can be a catalyst for change. But it can also be a safety valve for a release of tension and one that results in paralysis. I sometimes wonder if The Master and Margarita – the novel I have heard Russians speak the most passionately about – explains many Russians’ indifference to politics and current affairs. They are deeply cynical, for reasons explored fully in this novel. Bulgakov describes a society where nothing is as it seems. People lie routinely. People who do not deserve them receive rewards. You can be declared insane simply for wanting to write fiction. The Master and Margarita is, ultimately, a huge study in cognitive dissonance. It’s about a state of mind where nothing adds up and yet you must act as if it does. Often, the only way to survive in that state is to tune out. And, ideally, make a lot of jokes about how terrible everything is.
Overtly, Bulgakov also wants us to think about good and evil, light and darkness. So as not to be preachy about things, he does this by mixing in absurd humour. Do you choose to be the sort of person who joins Woland’s retinue of weirdos? (Wall-eyed goons, step forward!) Or do you choose to be the sort of person who is prepared to go to an insane asylum for writing poetry? (I didn’t say these were straightforward choices.) On a deeper level, he is asking whether we are okay with standing up for what we believe in, even if the consequences are terrifying. And he is challenging us to live a life where we can look ourselves in the eye and be happy with who we are. There is always a light in the dark. But first, you have to be the right kind of person to be able
to see it.
The Master and Margarita is so fantastical that many aspects of it cannot possibly be autobiographical, however much I would like to have discovered that Bulgakov owned a really fat, massive cat. But some scenes are drawn from real life. There is a suggestion that Bulgakov must have based some of the ball scenes in the novel on a legendary party he and his wife, Yelena Sergeyevna, were invited to at the American embassy in 1935. She writes in her diary that they went to a special imported-goods shop and bought ‘English’ fabric which cost twenty-five gold roubles a length to have tails made for Bulgakov. She wears an evening dress of ‘rippling dark blue with pale pink flowers’ and has two people round to dress her, the seamstress and a friend. The party itself sounds amazing. Next to the orchestra is a section cordoned off with a net which houses ‘live pheasants and other birds’. In the dining room there are ‘live bear-cubs in one corner, kid goats, and cockerels in cages’. On the top floor, where Kazakh dancers are performing, they have set up a kebab stand. According to one account, the bear was not house-trained and befouled a general’s uniform.
At the time, Bulgakov had tried to befriend various American embassy types in his attempts to travel abroad. One of my favourite diary entries in Manuscripts Don’t Burn comes from the occasion when one of them invites Bulgakov for lunch. ‘Before the meal we were served cocktails,’ he writes. Then he adds: ‘The meal was without soup.’ Both the diaries and the letters of Bulgakov and his wife are full of good-humoured anecdotes about their attempts to maintain a decent, middle-class life in the face of the system’s attempts to hobble Bulgakov as a writer. Yelena writes: ‘Yesterday, quite by chance – an American was moving out of our block – I bought Misha a very elegant and original-looking fur-coat for a thousand roubles. The fur is grey – American grizzly bear.’
The figure of Margarita was also, to some extent, drawn from life: she is based on Yelena Sergeyevna. The story of how Bulgakov and his ‘real-life Margarita’ met is like something out of a fantastical novel itself. When they first came across each other in 1929, she was married to a lieutenant general and had two young sons. (BulgaKov had already been married twice.) At this first encounter, however, she knew, Russian-style, that this was her fate. She initially avoided the relationship, refusing to leave the house or answer any phone calls or letters from him. Supposedly, a year and a half later, having not set foot out of the house in all that time (I find this bit hard to believe), she ran into Bulgakov in the street and he told her, ‘I can’t live without you.’
They married in 1932 and had eight years together before Bulgakov died from a kidney disorder inherited from his father. Their time together was difficult because Bulgakov was under intense scrutiny. They tried to put a brave face on things and sometimes seemed to fake a ‘let them eat cake’ mentality in the face of despair. Another diary entry from Yelena Sergeyevna: ‘For supper we had caviar, smoked salmon, home-made pâté, radishes, fresh cucumbers, fried mushrooms, vodka and white wine.’ They invite friends out to ‘the club’ for pelmeni (dumplings – think soggy ravioli) and go to performances of Prokofiev and Shostakovich (‘without noticing it we drank three bottles of champagne’). When Bulgakov was told that if he didn’t write a propaganda play when it was demanded of him, his most successful play would be withdrawn from the theatre, he replied: ‘Oh well, I shall have to sell the chandelier.’ Later, Yelena Sergeyevna writes: ‘We are 17 thousand [roubles] in debt and don’t have a kopek of current income.’
Bulgakov could have a real Noël Coward quality about him. On the tenth-anniversary performance of his play The Days of the Turbins, there is no celebration. ‘Needless to say, it didn’t even occur to the Theatre to mark it in any way,’ Yelena Sergeyevna writes. Bulgakov pens a letter imagining an anniversary present from the theatre producers: ‘The valuable gift will take the form of a large saucepan made of some precious metal (copper, for example), filled with all the blood they have sucked from me over the ten years.’ In 1937, he notes in a letter to a friend that ‘well-wishers’ have started to say to him, ‘Never mind, it will all get printed after your death.’ ‘I am very grateful to them, of course!’ he jokes.
He celebrated the success of his plays but hated taking a bow on stage. He was endlessly tormented by the director Stanislavsky rehearsing his plays but never staging them, and he found it exceedingly irritating that, whenever he went to the rehearsal, the actors were not going over the scenes but were being lectured by Stanislavsky about some completely random and unrelated thing. When at last his play Molière premiered (this was one that Stanislavsky rehearsed for four years), it received twenty-two curtain calls. But it also had four significant negative reviews and within six weeks had been cancelled, after a final, unsigned article in Pravda finished it off. The headline? ‘Superficial Glitter and False Content’. Can you imagine having your play rehearsed for four years, it getting twenty-two curtain calls and then having to close within six weeks? Bulgakov’s state of mind doesn’t bear thinking about.
But Bulgakov likened the idea of a writer not writing to expecting someone to give up sex. ‘Supposing a man has been told, “You can’t have children.” Then he says to himself, “So what’s the point of having sexual relations. To hell with it!” And then a monstrous thing happens: his health goes to pieces, he is consumed with exasperation and frustration, he sees naked girls in his sleep and can’t think of anything else. Is an artist’s desire to write any weaker than sexual desire?’ He struggled to resign himself to his fate and suffered bitterly. He wrote in his diary in 1922: ‘My wife and I are starving. The other day I had to ask my uncle to help us with some flour, oil and potatoes.’ He complained to writer friends that he couldn’t write to them in ink because he couldn’t afford it: only in scratchy pencil. In 1929, he wrote to his brother: ‘All my plays have been banned and not a single line of my fiction has been published. Bulgakov, the writer, is dead.’ And in 1930: ‘I am doomed to remain silent and possibly starve.’
The interactions with Stalin became progressively worse. Bulgakov first came to Stalin’s attention as a result of his play The Days of the Turbins, a theatrical adaptation of his novel The White Guard. The play was savaged by the Soviet critics, who were horrified that it sympathized with White officers. But Stalin saw this ultimately as a compliment (or at least he pretended to – possibly, he was already toying with Bulgakov), claiming that to show the White officers as decent people and still depict them as defeated losers was in fact a great tribute to Soviet power. It was ‘a demonstration of the crushing power of Bolshevism’. (Hmm. Sounds like a play you’d really like to go and see, right?) Stalin was very weird about the things that he liked (surprise!) and the things that he liked to pronounce on. He went to see this play fifteen times.
This did not help Bulgakov; if anything, the opposite. By 1929, his work had been banned. And by 1930, he was writing a letter to Stalin asking for his permission to emigrate. Stalin telephoned Bulgakov and, again, not really supporting him, more likely playing with him, gave him a job at the Moscow Art Theatre. On 18 April 1930, Bulgakov had a phone call from Stalin, having written to him to explain that he needed work or permission to leave the country. Stalin: ‘Is it true that you want to leave the country? Are we really so disgusting to you?’ It is thought that this phone call was motivated by the suicide of the poet Mayakovsky. To some extent, the state needed Bulgakov – or, at least, they needed to be able to pretend that he wasn’t unhappy with the idea of Soviet power.
There is so much to like about Bulgakov. As Ellendea Proffer relates in her biography, his colleagues on a literary magazine noted that he was so old-school that it antagonized people. He wore his fur coat (which was seen as bourgeois). He kissed women’s hands. He bowed. The crease in his trousers was always pressed just so. When trying to recover from illness on holiday in Sukhumi on the Black Sea, he wrote that he was eating only rice pudding and bilberry jelly because the hotel food was ‘complete rubbish’ like beef stroganoff. He used to send his wife lette
rs that said things like ‘Musya! [one of his many pet diminutives for her] I’ve never eaten anything so delightful. Thank you for a marvellous supper.’ In another letter when they are apart, he writes about some insect bites on his foot that are annoying him: ‘I’ve just realized that I’m writing nonsense! It must be very interesting to read about the sole of my foot! I’m sorry.’
As recounted in the diaries in Manuscripts Don’t Burn, at one point Yelena’s sister takes over the typing up of The Master and Margarita, and she absolutely hates the book. Her experience of being one of the first readers of the greatest novel of the twentieth century is not a happy one. She tells Bulgakov she has told her husband she ‘can’t see the main direction in the novel’. This, Bulgakov notes, is twenty-two chapters in. If she doesn’t get it now, she’s never going to get it. ‘In the course of 327 pages she smiled once, on page 245 (“Glorious sea …”). Why that precisely should amuse her I do not know. I am not confident that she will ever succeed in discovering any sort of main direction in the novel, but on the other hand I am certain that utter disapproval of the work on her part has been guaranteed.’ She told him, damningly: ‘This novel is your own private affair.’ (This is a very Russian thing to say. A bit like saying in English: ‘Well, it’s up to you …’ when clearly what you mean to say is: ‘This is mad and a very bad idea.’)
In his final year alive, there was a terrible brush with Stalin. Bulgakov wrote what was to be his last letter to him, to intercede on behalf of his friend the playwright Nikolai Erdman. (This particular intervention didn’t get Erdman what he wanted, but he later won the Stalin Prize and lived until 1970.) Bulgakov was then working on Batumi, a play that had been commissioned for Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, which fell at the end of 1939. (Batumi is a resort in Georgia where Stalin had spent some of his youth.) It later transpired that there was some confusion over Stalin’s birthdate, which he changed at least once. It now seems more likely that he turned sixty in 1938. Which makes it even more annoying that Bulgakov was being forced to work on a play he didn’t want to work on to celebrate a birthday on the wrong day and in the wrong year. (Welcome to Soviet power.)
