The fact that Woland speaks good Russian serves only to make him suspect. ‘He’s not just a foreign tourist, he’s a spy. He’s a Russian émigré and he’s trying to catch us out … He’s pretending to be an idiot so that he can trap us with some compromising question. You can hear how he speaks Russian’ (p. 24). Woland finds himself directly challenged: ‘You’re no German and you’re not a professor! You’re a spy and a murderer! Show me your papers’ (p. 62). Even Kant deserved to be arrested and ‘given three years in the Solovki asylum’ for his proof of the existence of God (p. 19). Someone is suspected of being a ‘kulak’ simply because he has a ‘surly’ face, and even the people streaming into the city for the feast day include ‘magicians, astrologers, seers and murderers’ (p. 31).
NKVD, the organization
The largest identifiable group – apart from the troublemakers accompanying the dubious magician Woland – are the members of an authority that is omnipresent and that constantly intervenes.The presence of the NKVD in the novel is pervasive from the outset. It is not hard to see where its headquarters are to be found – in the Lubianka on Dzerzhinsky Square.
On that early Saturday morning there was no sleep for a whole floor of a certain Moscow office which was busy investigating the Woland case; in nine offices the lamps had been burning all night. Their windows, looking out onto a large asphalted square which was being cleaned by slow, whirring vehicles with revolving brushes, competed with the rising sun in brightness. (pp. 374–5)
The work of these offices is described at the end of the novel – it was to expose conspiracies: ‘The department in charge of this strange case now had the task of drawing together all the strands of the varied and confusing events, occurring all over Moscow, which included an apparent mixture of sheer devilry, hypnotic conjuring tricks and barefaced crime’ (p. 375). The organization always makes its appearance in threatening contexts, not as a ‘friend or helper’. In the early versions of the novel, the GPU was still referred to by name; subsequently, the name became taboo and was replaced by general phrases such as ‘where you have to report’ or ‘where you are summoned’. The power structure is symbolized by its anonymity and omnipresence, by its mysterious nature, by its total knowledge against which there is no defence, by its ability to penetrate every space, by its putting in an appearance at any hour of the day or night. Investigating officials have no names; they are simply ‘they’.18 The word ‘arrest’ is replaced by the sentence ‘We need to sort something out’ or ‘We need your signature here’. The organization is also involved when you are asked by ‘a correct militiaman in white gloves to come with me for a few minutes’.19 Representatives of this secretive institution always turn out to be people of ‘indeterminate’ profession, even after lengthy acquaintance. They can be recognized by their gait and their outward appearance. The dancers included ‘young men of unknown occupation with cropped hair and shoulders padded with cotton wool’ (p. 75). The agents of this secretive organization normally make their appearance in twos and threes. They occupy themselves in a ‘busy’ fashion and give their instructions ‘without moving their lips’. They are dressed ‘in blousons with little Brownings in their belts’, ‘with collars, with their belts pulled tight around their waists, and revolvers in their hands’, ‘with rhomboid insignia on their lapels’, ‘official-looking, in Russian shirts with collars or similar clothes’. We seem to be dealing with a very specific phenotype.20 The authorities are spoken of only indirectly and as if talking about an anonymous body. ‘This can be discovered soon enough’, ‘They have found out all there is to know’, ‘Everything has been deciphered’, ‘All of this will be explained, very quickly in fact’. Everyone seems to know of the existence of this organization and they all suffer from its ubiquitous presence. People are afraid and go pale whenever it makes its appearance. It takes people away, confiscates manuscripts and seals up apartments.
Collaboration with government agencies and acting as an informer are everyday occurrences. Bulgakov’s informer is a mass manifestation and not necessarily a monster, as can be seen from Aloysius Mogarych, whose cultivated manner makes a strong impression on the Master. The informer often has loftier, ideal motives, not merely base, egotistical ones, such as when he denounces someone else in order to obtain possession of that person’s apartment. Even a poet such as Bezdomny is motivated by his sense of his duty as a citizen when he asks the authorities to have someone arrested. Baron Maigel is a member of the Theatre Commission and responsible for looking after the foreigners he shows around the sights of the capital. He is inquisitive and cultivated, but also a professional spy and ‘eavesdropper’ who keeps Woland under observation.21
‘People vanished from their apartments without trace’
Whenever the authorities step in, people’s houses are searched, arrests are made and people disappear. Bulgakov himself had experience of interrogations and arrests; he too had lost manuscripts during searches of his apartment. The drafts of the novel contain several detailed accounts of such visitations. There is a lengthy description of an attempted raid on a ‘criminal gang’ in apartment No. 50, starting with the arrival of the police car and proceeding to the full occupation of the apartment. The parallel plot in Jerusalem also contains an ancient version of the secret police at work in the shape of Arthanius and the centurion Mark, the so-called rat-catchers. Bulgakov even goes so far as to allow himself to ask what had made this representative of the secret police so ‘harsh and callous’. ‘It would be interesting to know who mutilated him’ (p. 36).
People disappear one after the other; in fact the entire dramatis personae vanish from the scene. This process of disappearance is concentrated in apartment No. 50.
Two years ago odd things began happening in that apartment – people started to vanish from it without trace. One Monday afternoon a policeman called, invited the second lodger (the one whose name is no longer known) into the hall and asked him to come along to the police station for a minute or two to sign a document. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna’s devoted servant of many years, to say that if anybody rang him up he would be back in ten minutes. He then went out accompanied by the courteous policeman in white gloves. But he not only failed to come back in ten minutes; he never came back at all. Odder still, the policeman appeared to have vanished with him.
Other lodgers gradually disappeared too.
Witchcraft once started, as we all know, is virtually unstoppable. The anonymous lodger disappeared, you will remember, on a Monday; the following Wednesday Belomut, too, vanished from the face of the earth, although admittedly in different circumstances. He was fetched as usual in the morning by the car that took him to work, but it never brought him back and never called again.
Words cannot describe the pain and distress which this caused to Madame Belomut, but alas for her, she was not fated to endure even this unhappy state for long. On returning from her dacha that evening, whither she had hastily gone with Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna found no trace of Madame Belomut in the apartment and what was more, the doors of both rooms occupied by the Belomuts had been sealed. Two days of uncertainty and insomnia passed for Anna Frantzevna: on the third day she made another hasty visit to her dacha from whence, it need hardly be said, she never returned. Anfisa, left alone, cried her eyes out and finally went to bed at two-o’clock in the morning. Nobody knows what happened to her after that, but tenants of the neighbouring apartment described having heard knocking coming from No. 50 and having seen lights burning in the windows all night. By morning Anfisa too was gone. Legends of all kinds about the mysterious apartment and its vanishing lodgers circulated in the building for some time. (pp. 92–3)
Sudden deaths, execution as spectacle
Right at the start of the novel the literary bureaucrat Berlioz is run over by a tram. Woland had warned him of his forthcoming death, but even so it came suddenly, unexpectedly, abruptly. The sudden, unexpected arrival of death is part of the prevailing mood of Bulgakov’s novel. The a
ppearance of something unexpected, the shock of having been surprised by an unforeseeable event, is what is still flashing through Berlioz’s mind as he falls under the wheels and his head is severed. ‘Berlioz’s life was so arranged that he was not accustomed to seeing unusual phenomena. Paling even more, he stared and thought in consternation: “It can’t be!” But alas it was …’ (p. 14). His sudden death has evidently become the norm. ‘Of course man is mortal, but that’s only half the problem. The trouble is that mortality sometimes comes to him so suddenly! And he cannot even say what he will be doing this evening’ (p. 22). Sometimes death may actually appear to be the lesser evil, and you even come across it in such a common saying as ‘All right, shoot me. Do what you like to me, but I’m not getting up!’ (p. 91). Unexpected deaths surround Bulgakov, the witness of contemporary events. Strange, never satisfactorily explained deaths included those of Viacheslav Menzhinskii, the former head of the OGPU, in 1934; Valerian Kuibyshev, the head of Gosplan; the writer Maxim Gorky, in 1936; and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of Stalin’s closest associates, who died early in 1937. Moscow was full of rumours about ‘medical murders’. Margarita finds herself the witness of a funeral whose ceremonial nature was becoming increasingly familiar to Muscovites in those years:
Above the noise of traffic there clearly came the sound of approaching drum-beats and the braying of some off-key trumpets. First to pass the park railings was a mounted policeman, followed by three more on foot. Next came the band on a lorry, then a slow-moving open hearse carrying a coffin banked with wreaths and a guard of honour of four people – three men and a woman. Even from a distance Margarita could see that the members of the guard of honour looked curiously distraught. This was particularly noticeable in the woman, who was standing at the left-hand rear corner of the hearse. Her fat cheeks seemed to be more than normally puffed out by some secret joke and her protuberant little eyes shone with a curiously ambiguous sparkle. It was as if the woman was liable at any moment to wink at the corpse and say ‘Did you ever see such a thing? Stealing a dead man’s head …!’ The three hundred-odd mourners, who were slowly following the cortège on foot, looked equally mystified. (p. 256)
A precise image of destruction unleashed is to be found in Margarita’s furious trashing of the furniture in the apartment of a hated culture official. It begins with her systematic smashing with a heavy hammer of the piano keyboard – a status symbol of the newly emerging class.
Margarita took careful aim and hit the keys of the grand piano, sending a crashing discord echoing through the apartment. The innocent piano, a Bäcker baby grand, howled and sobbed. With the sound of a revolver shot, the polished sounding-board split under a hammer-blow. Breathing hard, Margarita smashed and battered the strings until she collapsed into an armchair to rest. (p. 272)
The novel is transformed at various points into a ‘theatre of cruelty’ by passages of peerless precision that only a trained doctor like Bulgakov could have conceived. These images are those of people who have been beaten, tortured and executed. Even Berlioz’s death beneath the wheels of the tram is no mere street accident. ‘Berlioz vanished from sight under the tramcar and a round, dark object rolled across the cobbles, over the kerbstone and bounced along the pavement. It was a severed head’ (p. 59). The corpse laid out in the morgue is described even more graphically: ‘On the first [table] was the naked, blood-caked body with a fractured arm and smashed rib-cage, on the second the head, its front teeth knocked in, its vacant open eyes undisturbed by the blinding light, and on the third – a heap of mangled rags’ (p. 73). There is a similarly vivid description of cruel scenes in the parallel narrative. Yeshua is the ‘man with the bruised face standing … in the pitiless Jerusalem morning sunshine’ (p. 32); he has a ‘twisted, swollen, purpling wrist’ (p. 34). The Variety Theatre is the setting for a gory scene in which the audience is both fascinated and shocked when the cat Behemoth cuts off the head of the compère Bengalsky: ‘Two and a half thousand people screamed as one. Fountains of blood from the severed arteries in the neck spurted up and drenched the man’s shirtfront and tails. The headless body waved its legs stupidly and sat on the ground. Hysterical shrieks rang out through the auditorium’ (p. 147). A little later on his head is placed back on his body. The methods of killing are perfunctory and even mechanical: ‘Can you believe it? Bang – his head was off, scrunch – away went his right leg, scrunch – off came his left leg!’ (p. 226).
Violence made visible reaches its climax when Yeshua is condemned and crucified. The first event is modelled on scenes of fanatical throngs demanding the death of the traitor; the second is an execution carried out with extreme precision. The square in front of the hippodrome – in other words, the city’s major public space – becomes the setting for a grandiose mass scene, a ‘people’s court’, that even the representative of imperial power cannot afford to ignore. ‘The Procurator realised that already there was assembling in the square a numberless crowd of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, excited by the recent disorders; that this crowd was waiting impatiently for the pronouncement of sentence and that the water-sellers were busily shouting their wares’ (p. 43). The sentence was confirmed, but because of the approach of Passover the people are given the choice of releasing one of the prisoners: Bar Abba or Ha-Notsri. Pilate steps out onto the platform: ‘The moment the white cloak with the blood-red lining appeared atop the stone block at the edge of that human sea a wave of sound – ‘Aaahh’ – struck the unseeing Pilate’s ears. It began softly, far away at the hippodrome end of the square, then grew to thunderous volume and after a few seconds, began to diminish again’ (p. 50). Pilate then handed Dismas, Hestas, Bar-Abba and Yeshua Ha-Notsri over to the voice of the people. ‘It was as though the sun detonated above him and drowned his ears in fire, a fire that roared, shrieked, groaned, laughed and whistled’ (p. 51). This hurricane of mass hysteria seals Yeshua’s fate. What now follows are the events of the execution on Mount Golgotha. No one had tried to liberate him, neither in Jerusalem, which was overrun with troops, nor on the hill itself, the place of execution, which ‘was ringed by a double cordon’ (p. 196). Covered with blood, the three bodies hung from the gibbets; the group of hooded executioners busied themselves with their preparations. The crucified men had lost consciousness; they had fainted, their faces were so completely covered with mosquitoes and horse-flies that they ‘were entirely hidden by a black, heaving mask’ (p. 205). The executioner kills Yeshua and the other two in succession by piercing their hearts with his spear. The hooded man confirms that the bloodstained bodies hanging on the crosses are those of dead men (p. 207). This indelible image will keep the memory of the execution and everything connected with it alive. Long after the magician has left the city with his troops, long after the Master and Margarita have ridden off to freedom, Professor Ivan Ponirev of the Institute of History and Philosophy, who makes his appearance in the Epilogue, will continue to be plagued by nightmares, reminding him of this scene:
It is always the same thing that wakens the scholar and wrings that pitiful cry from him. He sees a strange, noseless executioner who, jumping up and uttering a grunt as he does so, pierces the heart of the maddened Hestas, lashed to a gibbet. But what makes the dream so horrible is not so much the executioner as the lurid, unnatural light that comes from a cloud, seething and drenching the earth, of the kind that accompanies only natural disasters. (pp. 443–4)
‘It can’t be!’
The important point here is ‘the unnatural light’, the atmosphere, the context of all these events. It is not the events themselves that remain, but their context, their relationship to one another or their lack of it, their mysterious nature. Bulgakov’s novel exposes a situation in which everything has become possible. Nobody understands what is happening. And it is not just one of the numerous heroes of the novel who have this experience. Varenukha, the administrator of the Variety Theatre, for example, had seen many things in the course of his duties, ‘but now he felt his mind becoming paralysed and h
e could find nothing to say beyond the commonplace and absurd remark: “It can’t be!” ’ (p. 126). Another character, Rimskii, can only say, ‘I don’t understand it! I don’t understand it! I don’t understand it!’ And he wonders why ‘he had to find an immediate, on-the-spot, natural solution for a number of very unusual phenomena’ (p. 127). There are a number of attempts to provide explanations – hypnosis, mass hypnosis, magic tricks performed by brilliant seducers and magicians, and the mental state of the citizens of Moscow – ‘overstimulation of the motor nerves’, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘disturbed imagination’ and ‘hallucinations’ (p. 88).
The situation is that the extraordinary is no longer perceived as such. People become accustomed to fantastic events, to the fact, for example, that ‘a cat the size of a pig, black as soot and with luxuriant cavalry officers’ whiskers’, could enter a tram and purchase a ticket. ‘Both conductress and passengers seemed completely oblivious of the most extraordinary thing of all: not that a cat had boarded a tramcar – that was after all possible – but the fact that the animal was offering to pay its fare! The cat proved to be not only a fare-paying but a law-abiding animal’ (pp. 63–4). Someone else remarked [about Berlioz having his head cut off – Trans.]: ‘I quite agree that it’s a nasty business – a child could see that’ (p. 137). Of course, everything possible was done, ‘not only to catch the criminals but to provide explanations for what they had done. A reason was found for everything and one must admit that the explanations were undeniably sensible’ (pp. 435–6). Nevertheless, an inexplicable residue remained: ‘Meanwhile the city was seething with the most incredible rumours, in which a tiny grain of truth was embellished with a luxuriant growth of fantasy’ (p. 384). ‘There is no need to mention the flood of incredible rumours which buzzed around Moscow for long afterwards and even spread to the dimmest and most distant reaches of the provinces (p. 433). Even after the ‘black magic’ had long since disappeared, many people continued to be traumatized; they were unable to resume their work – events had left their mark on them. Others forgot what had happened and yet others interpreted it in such a way as to make it seem as if nothing had happened. ‘And what had happened to them? Nothing. Nothing could ever happen to them because they never existed …’ (p. 440).
Moscow, 1937 Page 6
