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.1
From there they take their leave. The three of them are the cause of great turbulences – they cause a part of the mountain to slide into the Moscow River, the water to rise up in foam, blowing the hats off the passengers’ heads. They resemble the horsemen of the apocalypse, casting a shadow over the evening skies, blotting out the many-coloured towers and indeed the entire city. Moscow ‘had long vanished from sight, swallowed by the earth, leaving only mist and smoke where it had been’ (p. 425). Woland and his retinue gallop noisily on their steeds into the abyss while, ‘in the first rays of the morning’, the Master and Margarita ‘crossed a little moss-grown stone bridge’, where the Master discovers something which he ‘never knew in his lifetime – peace’ (p. 431).
The novel, which can be regarded as a roman-à-clef for twentieth-century Russia, comes to an end with this flight into the light and freedom. This spells the end of the story of the enigmatic appearance of a mysterious magician of whom no one can say whence he comes or what he is doing; it concludes a chain of events in the course of which the entire city is turned upside down and life is completely disrupted. People disappear; other people of a kind not seen in ‘normal’ life make their appearance. An example is Behemoth, a sagacious and witty tomcat the size of a human being. The magician can do almost anything; for example, he can foretell a person’s death and that person then dies; he is a contemporary of Pontius Pilate, the procurator of the Roman Empire in Judaea, but also an interlocutor of Immanuel Kant. With the aid of his sorcery, he transports the audience of a variety theatre into a state of madness and hysteria. His assistants and associates, Behemoth and Azazello, are no less inventive and irritating. They contrive to save a writer who is working away at his novel by having him shut up in an asylum. The novel he is working on constitutes a second level, a parallel world that is presented simultaneously with the events in Moscow. Its plot deals with the condemnation and the subsequent killing of Jesus by Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem because the representative of the Roman Empire lacks the courage to resist the pressure of the high priest and the mob who are calling for Jesus’ surrender and condemnation. This text within the text narrates a parallel story whose telling coincides with the freeing of the Master from the asylum and his reunion with his beloved Margarita, who for her part in order to regain her lover has willingly undergone great self-denial and pain as queen of the Great Ball of Satan, thus fulfilling the magician Woland’s demands.
Bulgakov’s novel could only be published posthumously some thirty years later, but over time it has proved to have an absolutely overwhelming impact, while its least ramifications have been subjected to exhaustive interpretations. It has been seen both as a satire on conditions in the Soviet Union and as a profound settling of accounts with socialist realism. However, a purely literary view of the novel may easily overlook the fact that it does not just tell a story intimately bound up with Moscow in 1937, but that it is also the best guide to an era that later generations find it hard to enter imaginatively. We can read Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel as an itinerary for a journey in time back to the Moscow of the 1930s. The reader will discover that the novel is in some ways superior to history because it develops an aspect of the age that has continued to this day to pose problems for the strict historian. Bulgakov’s ‘magic realism’ opens the way for descriptive methods that are largely denied to the historian: a story of the confusions and the dissolution of everything stable and solid, a fantastic space that is anything but unreal or surreal – the fantastic dimension of real life. To attempt this with non-literary, historical methods, more historico, should be the task of a historical narrative that is inspired, rather than deterred, by the privileges of a literary approach to knowledge and representation. Magic stands at the opposite pole to realism. ‘The phantasmagoric sujet’ (Irina Belobrovtseva) makes everything possible: the marvellous appearance and disappearance of people, magical transformations of people and animals, moving from place to place with supernatural rapidity, people who are invulnerable to weapons and persecution, transformations of water into wine, of clothed women to naked women, of citizens into fraudsters and informers, of the living into the dead.
Figure 1.1 The General Plan of Moscow: an aerial view of the city centre
‘The bird’s-eye view is the only point from which Moscow in 1937 can be grasped in its synchronicity, “at a glance”.’
Margarita’s flight
Margarita’s flight is no accidental event, no exotic extra added by the writer, but of central importance for the composition of the novel and the unfolding of the action. For Bulgakov, the flight stands for ‘freedom’ and is synonymous with way out, breakout and escape. In a dedication for his wife, Elena, he wrote: ‘You will accompany me on the last flight …’2 In September 1933 he noted, ‘Yet we shall, if we go on loving each other as we have done up to now, overcome all obstacles and triumph and fly.’3 In Elena Bulgakova’s diary the entire novel was referred to as ‘Margarita’s Flight’ as early as 8 November 1933.4
The metaphor of flight, however, does not merely connote flight into a world in which the Master and Margarita finally achieve peace; it also signifies a mode of flying over something, reconnoitring an otherwise almost unknowable topography. How is it possible to obtain an overall view of such a vast city as Moscow, a city that cannot be grasped at one go, if not from a bird’s-eye perspective that is made possible by distance but that is not so far removed from the earth’s surface as to obliterate all details? The bird’s-eye view is the only point from which Moscow in 1937 can be grasped in its synchronicity, ‘at a glance’. From such an angle it is possible to see not just the course of events but also the way they intersect and mutually stimulate or paralyse one another. The view from above is like looking at a map, and it brings things together that can otherwise be grasped only partially and one-sidedly, namely as historical events in time and space. Flying, flying over something, gazing down at events, is precisely the way in which events move and are described in Bulgakov’s novel. Flying above the world allows for an overview, for simultaneous presence at several points; it enables one’s gaze to dwell on the myriad activities of human beings, to obtain an insight into their multifarious micro-worlds, without losing the ‘grasp of the totality’. This explains why there are also such broad perspectives and extensive sightlines. In addition, Bulgakov uses the text to establish a further level of meaning: the Master’s novel about Pilate in Jerusalem, in which fundamental questions about human responses to extreme situations are reflected in alienated form – this too is a distanced gaze at the actual history of the present.
The recent history of flying undoubtedly played a role here. The 1930s were years of new altitude records, a new conquest of the skies, if also of memorable accidents and plane disasters – we need remember only the crash of the USSR’s largest civil aircraft, the Maxim Gorky, in 1935 or the Zeppelin catastrophe in Lakehurst in 1937.5 But there is a much closer parallel with the image of flying witches. Margarita makes her tours of Moscow as a witch whose magic potions enable her to fly. Witches flying on broomsticks are a topos of Western cultural history. Doctor Faustus was able to explore the world by flying over it with Mephistopheles – in his day this was a fantasy flight made possible only by an extreme act of the imagination.
The Protestant Faust of 1587 includes a fabulous airborne tour, as Faust flies over the towns of Europe on the back of his evil spirit Mephistopheles who has handily transformed himself into a horse with wings…. Mephistopheles helpfully provides him with tourist information en route. Much of this is lifted straight from Hartmut Schedel’s Book of Chronicles, pu
blished in Nuremberg in 1493 and richly illustrated with woodcuts.6
Witches rising up into the air was based on the idea of becoming lighter as a result of torture, a process of levitation that frees the spirit from all impediments and opens it up for confessions of every kind. Flying is what happens when the spirit is released from the body under the pressure of torture.
The rack or strappado was commonly used in witchcraft trials, normally for specified intervals of a quarter or half an hour. The victim would be suspended from the rack, her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders pulled back until they might become dislocated from bearing the weight of her whole body, and the pain would be intensified by attaching weights to her feet … Flying is a physical experience in which the normal limits on what human bodies can do no longer apply. Mystics, under the inspiration of divine visions, might also levitate. The suspension, both mental and physical, involved in flight might well express what it felt like to endure this kind of torture, literally unable to touch the ground … the widespread conviction that pain freed the tongue of the criminal was a cornerstone not only of the legitimacy of the witch hunt, but of the entire legal edifice of the time.7
Margarita, too, who has entered into a devil’s pact with Woland the magician – i.e. Mephistopheles – in order to restore the Master to liberty, takes the burden of pain and suffering on herself when, as the Queen of the Great Ball of Satan, she is exposed to all kinds of torture. And this is how Margarita herself experienced it after she rubbed the magic potion into her skin. She could now fly and could take her leave of her previous life. ‘Margarita felt free, free of everything’ (p. 264).
In the course of the novel, the witch’s flight becomes the vehicle or medium for the exploration of Moscow. There is no better means of navigation than Bulgakov’s novel. Whoever uses it is compelled to repeat the journey through the air, but this time in the opposite direction, namely into a city now destroyed.
The cloud from the west enveloped the vast city. Bridges, buildings, were all swallowed up. Everything vanished as though it had never been. A single whip-lash of fire cracked across the sky, and then the city rocked to a clap of thunder. There came another; the storm had begun. In the driving rain Woland was no more to be seen. (p. 409)
Such a flight opens up a perspective that transcends the clarity that we associate with a merely empirical description of the scene and leads us into ‘the lurid, unnatural light that comes from a cloud, seething and drenching the earth, of the kind that accompanies only natural disasters’ (pp. 443f.).
Manuscripts don’t burn: a writer in 1937
Bulgakov’s novel is not merely a timeless literary text; it is a document of its age, one in which the year 1937 has left its own traces. Although his work on the novel extended to more than a decade, and thus combined elements of the twenties and thirties, the period of both the New Economic Policy and the Great Terror, the unmistakable links to Moscow in 1937 can readily be identified in it.
More recently, a comprehensive analysis by literary scholars has reconstructed the different stages in the writing of the novel and located the changes that were introduced. Some eight different versions of the text have been identified by Bulgakov experts, whose work constitutes a separate branch of literary studies on its own.8 Research has laid bare the genesis and the variants of the Faust–Mephisto theme in Bulgakov, the Black Magician, the adviser with the cloven hoof, the Grand Chancellor, Satan, and the Black Theologian. It was concerned from the outset with Satan’s adventures, with a diabolical Moscow chronicle. Bulgakov was intimately familiar with the Faust material and its various ramifications and interpretations; he had also seen the rehearsals for the Faust opera at the Bolshoi Theatre. The definitive title of The Master and Margarita appeared for the first time in an entry in Elena Bulgakova’s diary on 23 October 1937. ‘Because of all these stories of his own and other people’s libretti, M.A. gradually comes to the decision to leave the Bolshoi Theatre, to edit the novel (The Master and Margarita), and submit it to a higher authority.’9 And on 1 March 1938 we read: ‘For M.A. the title is now definite: The Master and Margarita. Any hope that it will be printed no longer exists. Nevertheless, M.A. is revising it, getting on with it and intends to finish it during March. Working into the nights.’10 The diary entries are framed by newspaper reports of arrests of people close to Bulgakov – in the Moscow Art Theatre, among fellow writers – and of the start of the Bukharin trial, as well as brief notices of concerts or theatre performances: ‘Today in the papers, the information that on 2 March the cases of Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and others (including Professor Pletnev) are being dealt with in open court [i.e. the military section of the Supreme Court of the USSR]. In particular, Pletnev, Levin, Kazakov and Vinogradov (all doctors) stand accused of the cowardly assassination of Gorky, Menzhinsky and Kuibyshev …’11
The text was practically complete by October 1937, and Bulgakov then did no more than polish the writing up to his death on 10 March 1940.
As is well known, the novel was not published until thirty years later – in 1966–7 in the literary magazine Moskva,12 with a large number of censored passages and omissions. In all, around 12 per cent of the text disappeared. The first complete edition appeared in 1967, issued by the YMCA Press in Paris, and an edition with the omissions restored and highlighted was published by Posev in Frankfurt am Main in 1969.
During his lifetime Bulgakov gave readings from various chapters of the book; he also gave some thought to submitting the novel for publication, and even at the time everyone was convinced that there was no chance of this being successful. His diary reveals again and again the desperate plight of the writer condemned to silence. He had not been able to publish any prose text since 1927 and, apart from Days of the Turbins, no play by him had been staged. His wife noted on 23 September 1927, ‘Agonized search for a way out. Should he write to someone high up? Abandon the theatre? Edit the novel and submit it? Nothing to be done. Hopeless situation. Took a day trip on the steamer – it calms the nerves. Marvellous weather.’13
The autobiographical features of The Master and Margarita are obvious, even though it quite clearly does not amount to a self-portrait. The Master is essentially a historian who has worked in a museum as a translator – in other words, a member of the intelligentsia, who can speak English, French, German, Latin, Greek and Italian. He has rented two rooms in a cellar in the Arbat, but has given up his job in order to devote himself to writing his novel about Pontius Pilate, the manuscript of which is rejected by the literary bureaucrats Latunski and Berlioz on the grounds that it contains a positive view of Jesus Christ. Finally, he is a writer who, out of fear, tries to destroy his most treasured possession – his work.
Bulgakov’s intention in the ‘text within the text’ is to reinstate the story of Pontius Pilate, the trial and condemnation of Jesus, the crucifixion and the deposition from the cross, as a means of countering the insidious propaganda of the militant anti-God tendency. This provides the framework within which he can articulate his vision of betrayal, cowardice, loyalty and courage. It culminates in his confession of cowardice and belated remorse. The Master’s experience and suffering are also Bulgakov’s own. Writing for the desk drawer and for the samizdat, the feeling of being sentenced to silence, the confiscation of manuscripts – Bulgakov’s diary and other manuscripts had been temporarily seized during a house search in 1926 – and the unnerving quarrels with the bureaucrats of the Writers’ Union were all part of that experience, as was the protection and security promised him to death and beyond by Margarita, alias Elena Bulgakova. She had sworn on his deathbed that she would have the novel published. Bulgakov, who had already lost his voice, had handed it over to her ‘so that they should know, so that they should know.’14 Decades later, the passage of time would confirm what Woland tells the Master, after the latter had burned his manuscript: ‘I’m sorry but I don’t believe you. You can’t have done. Manuscripts don’t burn’ (p. 326).
&nb
sp; Relief map of the city, locations, staging posts
One of the reasons for the cult that began to spread around Bulgakov and his novel from the 1960s on undoubtedly lay in the fact that it revealed a city that had become invisible. A regular pilgrimage developed among people with a literary and historical interest in the places he described in what came to be known as ‘Bulgakov’s Moscow’. Bulgakov had lived in the city since 1921, and what the cult amounted to was the possibility of ‘reading’ Moscow and identifying places of importance to his life and work in the Moscow ‘text’. Bulgakov’s own apartment – in Bol'shaia Sadovaia ulitsa 10, Apartment 50, and later 34 – plays a crucial role in his novel. It is the setting for Satan’s Great Ball and the disappearance of numerous characters. Bulgakov had personal knowledge of the area containing the offices he had worked in – Glavpolitprosvet [the Political Education Section] in the Narkompros [People’s Commissariat for Education] at Sretenskii bul'var 6 – the editorial offices of Nakanune, Gudok, Rabochii, Rossiia, and the theatres where his plays, above all Days of the Turbins, had been performed or where he had worked in the Arts Theatre (MKhAT) or in the Bolshoi as assistant director, librettist and translator. The places where he gave readings from his works are known: the apartment of Sergei Zaiaitskii, in Mali Znamenskii pereulok 7, the literary circle of P. Zaitsev in Starokoniushenni pereulok 5, N. Piashnin’s apartment in Savelevskii pereulok 12, the meeting place of the literary Moscow of the end of the 1920s. What the novel encapsulates is the life and activities of the Writers’ House (the Griboiedov House in the novel), the Butyrka Prison, the house of Dramlit in Nikolopeskovskii pereulok in the Arbat, the Nierensee House in Bol'shoi Gnezdnikovskii pereulok, where the editorial offices of the periodical Nakanune were situated and where the Master first met Margarita, the Sparrow Hills over the Moscow River from where the city can be seen with its domes, the torgzin [hard-currency] shop close to Smolensky Market in Arbat ulitsa 54/2. The Master’s apartment is often associated with the house at Mansurovskii pereulok 9, where friends of Bulgakov had lived, and Margarita’s villa with the house at Malyi Rzhevskii pereulok 6.15 Apartments nos. 20 and 34 in Bol'shaia Sadovaia 10, where Bulgakov had lived with his first wife, are thought to be the prototypes for the apartments in the novel with their detailed descriptions of the interiors and atmosphere. The house appears in the novel as House 302-bis. It was constructed in the best period for Moscow buildings – 1903 – and was designed by the architect A. N. Milkov for a Moscow businessman and tobacco producer. At various times the poet Sergei Esenin, Isadora Duncan and the painter Petr Konchalovskii lived there, where they met the members of the avant-garde circle Bubnovyi Valet. In Bulgakov’s time the house was in the middle of a district full of amusements, a legendary music hall, the operetta theatre, a circus cinema and the Second State Circus.16
Moscow, 1937 Page 4
