Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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complete text of Bulgakov's first novel. The White Guard,
written in the
twenties and dealing with nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil
war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted
portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of
war in all of literature.
Bulgakov was known well enough, then. But, outside a very small group,
the existence of The Master and Margarita was completely unsuspected.
That
certainly accounts for some of the amazement caused by its publication. It
was thought that virtually all of Bulgakov had found its way into print. And
here was not some minor literary remains but a major novel, the author's
crowning work. Then there were the qualities of the novel itself-- its
formal originality, its devastating satire of Soviet life, and of Soviet
literary life in particular, its 'theatrical' rendering of the Great Terror
of the thirties, the audacity of its portrayal of Jesus Christ and Pontius
Pilate, not to mention Satan. But, above all, the novel breathed an air of
freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in
Soviet Russia. We sense it in the special tone of Bulgakov's writing, a
combination of laughter (satire, caricature, buffoonery) and the most
unguarded vulnerability. Two aphorisms detachable from the novel may suggest
something of the complex nature of this freedom and how it may have struck
the novel's first readers. One is the much-quoted 'Manuscripts don't burn',
which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry,
imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus
become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and
Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion. In fact, during a moment of