The Master and Margarita
thinking out loud about the novel, censorship, language police, religion
Recently, I have been devoting myself to reading Russian/Ukrainian literature. I started with Vassily Grossman’s work and now I’ve moved on to Mikhail Bulgakov. I know I’m a contrarian, but I’m low key about it and I’m not about to smash any of you over the head with the political significance of my reading practices. If you want to be beaten over the head with the political significance of culture, just spend some time in a contemporary art museum.
I decided to read really long novels because my attention span has been destroyed, like everyone else’s so it’s my protest performance.
During the Cold War, I was put off by people in the high middlebrow literary world hailing Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita as some kind of heroic act of mid-century liberalism — Soviet dissident, grandson of Orthodox priests — writes novel about Satan visiting Moscow and exposes socialist atheism as just one more human ruse to cover up the viciousness and sinfulness of a fallen human world.
I spent the past few weeks reading it on and off and listen I’m no expert, but the Master, author of the novel within the novel about Pontius Pilate and his condemnation of a Jesus figure, Yeshua to crucifixion is not clearly a religious hero.
The Master writes an unpublishable novel that Satan and his minions help him resolve. Bulgakov the playwright in real life writes an unpublishable novel that is serialized in censored form years after his death. It’s also inspired countless adaptations in film and television. Allegedly Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children as a tribute to it and Mick Jagger was inspired by it to write Sympathy for the Devil.
Some random thoughts about this book, written by a man who was born in Kyiv and worked his whole life in and with the Russian language:
Soviet era, (1930s?) Pre-war insane asylums seem like really well run places with compassionate doctors and kind nurses and single rooms with views of the moon. They are not the Foucauldian madhouses of Anglo-Saxon imagination. Maybe Bulgakov was bs’ing, but he represented a kind of a pro-institutionalization attitude untouched by Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Soviet writers with an ID card had access to a club in the center of Moscow, with a great restaurant and outdoor seating. Although many good writers were probably excluded from it, the very idea that you could get a good cheap meal in the center of your country’s capital because you were a writer seems comically Utopian, deliciously old fashioned and kind of beautiful.
The Devil, Woland is kind of a good guy. His minions are comical, murderous types.
Witches are extremely sexy.
This is a novel about the Soviet culture industries and the bureaucracies that keep it running. Critics, agents, finance directors, and poets get it pretty good.
This novel disrespects holy matrimony, but again, witches, who spend a lot of time naked, are extremely sexy.
The sexual politics of the novel would lead it to being banned again today, but I repeat myself, witches are extremely sexy.
There is not a hint, not a soupcon of a writer’s workshop in this novel about writers and writing.
Yeshua, or Jesus is imagined to be a sympathetic, not necessarily charismatic person, who believes in the goodness of all human beings, much to the consternation of Pontius Pilate, sent to bring order to a violent city, riven by religious fanaticism. It made me wonder deeply again, about Christianity and the power of worshipping a physically weak, but morally strong man suffering on the cross.
This novel is so much about worldliness, the worldliness of Moscow as a metropolis, full of illusions, spectacle, department stores, luxuries and miseries. Worldliness is a quality the Internet has destroyed.
The representation of the Moscow department store with its stern gatekeepers, ticket takers and service personnel tending to its luxury food section was amazing. All the salmon, oysters and caviar and pyramids of tangerines was downright Benjaminian.
The hysteria about foreign currency reminded me of my days of teaching English in Beijing. You had to have foreign currency to shop in the Friendship Store, with its foreign delicacies, milk from New Zealand, butter from France, cashmere from Xinjiang, Marlboro cigarettes from the U.S., Johnny Walker from the U.S. Oh how we had to clamor for those hard to come by items.