The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

demonologyalready “Muscovized”– thatis, reorientedtowardfertility,botched reincarnations, and the production of biological as opposed to mechanical monsters. When body parts come off in a Gogol Petersburg tale (recall “The Nose”), they strut around the city as incarnated Rank, identifiable not by the face (if there is a face) but by the official shape of the button. When living bodies are rearranged in Bulgakov, they either proliferate out of control or – to the horror of all – become human beings.

Like Chekhov, Bulgakov was trained as a medical doctor. He understood and respected physiology. The first of his science fiction – or science-gone-wrong – tales, The Fatal Eggs (1925), tells the story of a Moscow zoologist’s discovery of a fantastically potent red ray that, when directed at living tissue, causes it to grow exponentially in size and viciousness. When the state requisitions this ray to increase chicken-egg production, a minor bureaucratic accident intervenes: instead of chicken eggs, reptile eggs are radiated, and when they hatch, Soviet Russia is devastated by man-eating dinosaurs. An untimely frost in August kills them off. The second novella, Heart of a Dog, again combines science and reproduction, but more on the model of Frankenstein’s monster than H. G. Wells’s Food of the Gods. Also written in 1925, this manuscript was confiscated (together with Bulgakov’s diaries) in a secret-police search of the writer’s apartment in 1926, and first appeared in Russia only in the glasnost year 1987. Its plotline resembles The Fatal Eggs. Another scientist-professor, this time a surgeon, specializes in human rejuvenation via an implantation of youthful sexual organs. But his private passion is more ambitious: to create a New Man. He succeeds in transplanting the pituitary gland and testes of a recently deceased criminal into a mongrel dog. The dog turns into a human being with criminal habits but a canine psyche, the exemplary proletarian, who eventually hints to his aristocratic creator that he is preparing to denounce him to the authorities. Before any harm is done, however, this hybrid humanoid beast is re-operated into a dog. It is no accident that Woland, the enabling hero of The Master and Margarita, is also a professor, albeit of black magic, not body parts. The area of experimentation has now moved from reptiles through the human-canine body to the human soul. This is an appropriate sequence for the biologically inflected myth of Holy Moscow.

Along the lines of these early Gogolian exercises, in his Master and Margarita Bulgakov casts an entire layer of madcap demonic events in the comic, petty-devil zone. But there are important, Moscow-oriented differences. Bulgakov’s madness resides in the fictive characters alone. It does not infect the voice, vision, or sobriety of his narration or his narrator, who reports on gossips and rumors but never, or almost never, is dissolved in them. He addresses the reader

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from a congenial, authoritative distance, as might a responsible historian or an epic poet. Ethically, The Master and Margarita is a traditional humanist novel, with domestic tranquility as its final reward. Its hero and heroine, rescued by Woland from the Stalinist capital but not qualifying as martyrs who might live in the Light, end up crossing a moss-covered bridge to their new home. It is set (we are led to believe) in some quiet rural corner under blossoming cherry trees, in eternally recurring Moscow time.

Can there be a myth of the future? If so, how does Zamyatin’s OneState distribute, on either side of its Green Wall, the mythical essence of Russia’s two major cities? One way of reading the novel We in the context of the Russian literary tradition is to see it as a distilling chamber for several prominent tendencies, or anxieties, associated with the literature of each capital.