The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Thus we might say that the boldest “estrangement from reality” in The Master and Margarita is not the magic – that is, not the fact that black cats can walk upright and talk, that Margarita becomes a witch and flies around on a broomstick, that Woland dispatches a drunken theatre bureaucrat to Yalta in five seconds, or that Muscovites turn up in the marsh of a Siberian river with dancing mermaids at full moon. Such character types and episodes are completely routine and rule-abiding within the conventions of the genre from which they come: a Ukrainian folk tale as Gogol might write it up, or a Faust drama. The jolt comes when the reader realizes that the “illusion of reality” in those supremely realistic Jerusalem chapters has not been designed to “feel or look real” according to the usual fictional contract, where readers suspend their disbelief in order to enter into the fictive world. Those chapters simply are real. Or rather, they are as close as a work of verbal art can come to that condition, construed as a window on to an unconstructed prior fact. The names of people and places in the Jerusalem chapters are not the familiar canonized names of the Gospel accounts but what people and places were called back then, in their own time. They are not aware of their own symbolic significance. These scenes do not know that they are being read.

At one point the Master, terrified he will be arrested for the crime of writing about Jesus in an atheist state, burns his novel. Woland hands the book back to its author intact with the comment that “manuscripts don’t burn.” But why a manuscript doesn’t burn is of key importance. It is not only because the Prince of Darkness is there to retrieve it from the flames, his natural element and thus under his control, and not only because the artistic Word is immortal. Bulgakov suggests something more radical. The Master has not so much created as re-created reality, preserving truth and then releasing it through his novel. For this reason, even he cannot get rid of the document, which is a portal.

178 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Such a Modernist project, which presumes the existence of other worlds to which poets have privileged access, recalls Bely’s Petersburg. But Bulgakov’s reasons are quite different from Bely’s Faustian search for knowledge in the dual worlds of Symbolism, or Zamyatin’s celebration of the Dionysian impulse in the Mephi beyond the Green Wall. Bely disrupts the “Realist contract” through rhythmic word-symbols. Zamyatin slices visual images along multiple planes to invade and break down familiar worlds. Bulgakov adopts the Tolstoyan strategy of making a story even more truth-bearing if it can be shown to do without words – that is, if it can avoid the indignity of being dependent on one speaker’s limited perspective. Woland introduces this theme in the opening scene.

Mikhail Berlioz, editor, atheist, and head of the Writers’ Union, meets the “strange professor” at Patriarch’s Pond in Moscow. Berlioz and his poet-friend are suspicious of this foreign-looking fellow, especially when the three get into a debate about the historicity of Jesus Christ. Suddenly the professor whispers to them: “Keep in mind that Jesus did exist”:

“You know, Professor,” answered Berlioz with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but we happen to have a different point of view regarding that issue.”

“No points of view are necessary,” replied the strange professor. “He simply existed, that’s all there is to it.”

“But surely some proof is required,” began Berlioz.

“No, no proof is required,” answered the professor.16

At this point the professor’s foreign accent “somehow disappears,” and the first installment of this true story flows out from behind the text. Bulgakov had originally planned his novel as a “Gospel According to the Devil.” This Devil, a sad, thoughtful figure, remains the novel’s wisest, most authoritative source of knowledge, the coordinator of its various planes, and – like Zamyatin’s Mephi – an uneasy ally of the Good. Both sets of events, Woland in Moscow and Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, take place from Wednesday through Saturday night of the vernal full moon (Passover Week). Only in the final minutes of the final night do all levels of the novel unite on the same plane, in a triumphantly ahistorical timelessness. It is a time-space that Tolstoy always dreamed of. Every earthly creature had been in the same doubt, and now they can all be in the same truth. The author does not have to prove or persuade with the illusion of reality. He simply draws back the veil.