“Manuscripts don’t burn” - Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”

Mikhail Bulgakov

I must have first read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in 1971, four years after the first English translation – by Mirra Ginsburg - had been published in the West. I was helping an old friend decorate a largish house in Worthing during the summer vacation. He’d been given the job by an Englishwoman married to a Russian defector called Boris. 

We spent about a week at the house, and, as it had a rather creepy atmosphere at night (we kept hearing noises in the corridor outside our bedrooms) I ended up sleeping on a couch in the sitting room downstairs. That’s where I found the book. The cover must have aroused my interest, but I can’t remember what was on it – probably a large black cat holding a gun. At that stage, I had never read a Russian novel, and probably didn’t imagine I’d last more than a few pages before finding something more engrossing to help ward off my unmanly jitters.

There haven’t been that many occasions when a literary novel has completely engrossed me from start to finish –  they usually require some sort of effort - but this one certainly did.  I had simply never read anything like it: and I’ve never read anything like it since. It is unique on just about every level.

Trying to describe the book in detail tends to make you sound like an acid casualty, but just to give you the flavour... 

The Devil, in the guise of a magician, visits Moscow in the 1930s, where, aided by a variety of demons, including a huge, fat, talking, gun-toting tomcat, he creates mayhem in general, and amongst the city’s theatrical and literary circles in particular. 

In the opening chapter, a magazine editor, Berlioz (there’s a Stravinsky and a Rimsky elsewhere in the book) is discussing the impossibility of God’s existence with a (bad) young poet called Homeless in a strangely deserted local park on a hot summer evening when they’re joined by a foreign gentleman who claims to have known Pontius Pilate. Chapter Two describes Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus (which differs from the Biblical version, but is not blasphemous) and the Procurator of Judea remains a central character throughout. 

We return to the increasingly alarming discussion in Moscow. When Berlioz, spooked by the fact that the foreigner seems to know impossibly private details about his life, hurries out of the park, he slips on some spilt sunflower oil and falls under a streetcar, which slices his head off. The poet, Homeless, after trying to cross Moscow in a Tolstoy shirt and underpants, ends up in a lunatic asylum where another inmate, who introduces himself as The Master,  tells Homeless that he once wrote a book about Pontius Pilate, aided by his married mistress…

See what I mean?

Normally, I’d dismiss out of hand a book comprising a series of increasingly violent and bizarre “comic” events with a strong supernatural element seemingly unrestrained by any rules – i.e. the power of the evildoers is so great that there is no possible way of escaping or defeating them. But here it works triumphantly, because the objects of demonic sadism are in the main cowardly, immoral, unworthy creatures of the state. Whatever we feel about the Devil and his chums, we begin to realize that their victims and the society in which they exist deserve everything visited upon them. 

Bulgakov had a terrible time of it under the most monstrous tyranny the world has yet produced. He wrote a conventional novel to start with – The White Guard – and several other books (the short stories are particularly inventive), all of which were eventually or immediately suppressed. 

The man who is now generally regarded as the greatest Russian playwright of the 20th Century ended up having to scrape a living directing the work of mediocre nonentities. He had that sort of “on again/off again” relationship with Stalin (mainly off) suffered by so many gifted artists in that era of show trials, famine, torture and mass murder, when the Devil himself took human form. Once, in despair, Bulgakov wrote to Stalin, begging to be allowed to leave the country, given that he wouldn’t be allowed to write while he remained at home. (No prizes for guessing the response from History’s arch-sadist.)

The last years of Bulhakov’s life were spent writing and endlessly revisingThe Master and Margarita, with the constant help of his wife (the novel abounds in echoes from the writer’s own life.) 

The book, was still in a state of some disarray when the writer died at the age of 51 in 1940 – he was working on it right till the end. Consequently, not all the loose ends are tied up, but I hope I’m not giving too much by saying that it ends well, if unconventionally, for the central characters. 

And, in a strange way, it ended well for Bulgakov himself, in that the statement he gives to Satan in the book – “Manuscripts don’t burn” - was triumphantly proved in 1967, when his masterpiece was finally published. Since then it has been translated into a host of languages, has remained constantly in print, and is now generally accepted as one of the greatest works of the creative imagination of the last hundred years. 

The Master and Margarita is a strange, utterly original book – but it’s hard to say why it works so well. It really shouldn’t, but it does. Part of its secret, I suppose, is  its odd mixture of sadism and compassion – in the end, you wind up not hating any of the characters, all of whom seem to be caught up in a deranged system not of their own making, which seems to have been devised to bring out the worst in all but the most courageous. It should be a dreadfully bitter book, given the circumstances in which it was written – but it just isn’t. Bulgakov evidently relished the opportunity to stick it to the vile pygmies who colluded in crushing his career, but in the process he turns them into a gallery of very human, very understandable characters. Even the Devil comes well out of it. And Pontius Pilate . And, of course, at its heart it’s a love story, which helps.

In terms of its tone, verve, comic invention and sheer relish of Russian rascality and bravery in the face of a deranged bureaucracy, the novel’s most obvious ancestor is, I suppose, Gogol’s Dead Souls. I wonder what sort of satirical masterpiece Russia will produce in the current century: I hope it’s already being written, as I’d love to read it.