Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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written this poem, and in a very short time, but unfortunately the editor
was not at all satisfied with it. Homeless had portrayed the main character
of his poem - that is, Jesus - in very dark colours, but nevertheless the
whole poem, in the editor's opinion, had to be written over again. And so
the editor was now giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, with the
aim of underscoring the poet's essential error.
It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolaevich down - the
descriptive powers of his talent or a total unfamiliarity with the question
he was writing about - but his Jesus came out, well, completely alive, the
once-existing Jesus, though, true, a Jesus furnished with all negative
features.
Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not
how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply
never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction,
the most ordinary mythology.
It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and in his
conversation very skilfully pointed to ancient historians - for instance,
the famous Philo of Alexandria[6] and the brilliantly educated
Flavius Josephus[7] - who never said a word about the existence
of Jesus. Displaying a solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed
the poet, among other things, that the passage in the fifteenth book of
Tacitus's famous Annals, the forty-fourth chapter, where mention is made
of
the execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious interpolation.
The poet, for whom everything the editor was telling him was new,
listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his pert green eyes on
him, and merely hiccuped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under
his breath.
There's not a single Eastern religion,' Berlioz was saying, 'in which,