Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Master and Margarita is one of those novels, like Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, containing two stories which barely intersect. One of the pleasures of the multi-plot Victorian novel (and War and Peace is like this, too) is to see widely divergent points brought together in a final vortex of connectivity. The kind of novel I am talking about refuses this: the hemispheres only just meet, like the fleeting touch of dance partners in, well, a Tolstoy novel.

Master and Margarita might really be said to have three narratives: the “Satan comes to town” story, which for the most part reads like a combination of Gogol’s Dead Souls and a sort of Don Quixote in reverse; the love story between the author Master and the unhappily married Margarita; and the story of Pontius Pilate, which is the subject of Master’s novel, but is narrated variously through Satan, a burned manuscript of said novel, and a madman’s drugged hallucination. 

It seems axiomatic to me that we can’t say anything about the work as a whole without knowing how to put these parts together. Well, that is, unless we want to say that the book is a “satirical condemnation of Stalinist terror,” decide that this is worth our time to learn, and leave it at that.

Not that I am sure the novel *is* worth our time. The coordination of the different strands is uneven, many of the characters do not even rise to one-dimensionality, it abounds in clichéd and uninteresting depictions of greed and vice, and the ending is not of a sort that we are used to (since in the tradition of Gogol, Sterne, whose novels don’t really “conclude” but just break off).

 The translation I read links me to a website (greatbooks.org) with “discussion questions” which are not at all fatuous. Here are the most interesting.

• Why does Woland come to Moscow?

At an aesthetic level, this can be answered with reference to Georg Lukács’ typology, in The Theory of the Novel, of Sterne, Cervantes, and Gogol as novels of “abstract idealism,” namely “the demonism of the narrowing of the soul… forgets the existence of any distance between ideal and idea… Reality does not satisfy this a priori demand, thinks that reality is bewitched by evil demons… the complete absence of an inner problematic.” This is only to refer the problem to one of literary theory, but it is almost a literal paraphrase of Woland’s mission: the demonic but non-psychological mania to bewitch reality, to bring it into line with a monomaniacal directive. This is also the plot of Don Quixote.

But Woland arrives in Moscow first to answer an argument about the existence of God between the editor Berlioz and the poet Homeless, in chapter 1. He poses them the following question: “If there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?… [and how can man govern himself when he] cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?” And the entire action of this part of the novel is Woland’s repeated demonstration that the bureaucratic “governance” that man has set up for himself is a fragile, vain farce–a proliferation of little frauds and petty grievances. The key to this part of the novel, then, is that Woland’s mission is not to “enchant” but to disenchant, to unmask, to expose… Do I need to tell you that the devil is subversive?

• When Woland sees Margarita’s compassion for Pilate, why does he tell her, “Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that”? 

What we learn from reading Paradise Lost, Faust, The Merchant of Venice, and the Bible’s Job, is that the devil is a liar. Woland says, “Don’t trouble yourself here,” and she immediately does trouble herself about Pilate’s fate. But again I have a Lukács answer: against the strivings of the demonic, “outside reality remains quite untouched.” Moscow is a bit burnt-up, but not really altered by the end of the book. That “everything will turn out right” is an acknowledgement (as we see in this scene) of his own (final) impotence, as we had seen before, when Woland addresses Matthew Levi:

You uttered your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either. Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people.

Satan is “real” only in this sense. “Everything will turn out all right” in the sense that magical diamonds will turn into worthless sardine labels…

• Why is the story of Pontius Pilate presented as not only written by the master, but also told by Woland, dreamed by Ivan, and read by Margarita? 

A better question perhaps would be what the story of Master and Margarita has to do with the Woland plot. For me it is the weakest part of the book. Ivan is the character who most nearly experiences the Stalinist paranoiac institution as a mirror of the Pilate story, but… Margarita? Of course she represents THE virtue of the book, given that “There is no greater vice than cowardice”–but am I alone in feeling that the novel would be strengthened by dropping both Master and Margarita? (Evidently these were the last pieces to be added, over various drafts.) If Master is guilty vis-a-vis Margarita, or himself, this is too lightly sketched-in to stand up to the overwhelming magic of the Pilate and Woland sections.