Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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fear early in his work on the novel, Bulgakov did burn what he had written.
And yet, as we see, it refused to stay burned. This moment of fear, however,
brings me to the second aphorism - 'Cowardice is the most terrible of vices'
- which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel. More
penetrating than the defiant 'Manuscripts don't burn', this word touched the
inner experience of generations of Russians. To portray that experience with
such candour required another sort of freedom and a love for something more
than 'culture'. Gratitude for such perfect expression of this other, deeper
freedom must surely have been part of the enthusiastic response of readers
to the novel's first appearance.
And then there was the sheer unlikeliness of its publication. By 1966
the 'thaw' that had followed Stalin's death was over and a new freeze was
coming. The hopes awakened by the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, the first public acknowledgement of the existence of the Gulag,
had been disappointed. In 1964 came the notorious trial of the poet Joseph
Brodsky, and a year later the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli
Daniel, both sentenced to terms in that same Gulag. Solzhenitsyn saw a new
Stalinization approaching, made worse by the terrible sense of repetition,
stagnation and helplessness. Such was the monotonously grim atmosphere of
the Brezhnev era. And in the midst of it there suddenly burst The Master and
Margarita, not only an anomaly but an impossibility, a sort of cosmic error,
evidence of some hidden but fatal crack in the system of Soviet power.
People kept asking, how could they have let it happen?
Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or
possibly at the end of 1928. It was abandoned, taken up again, burned,
resurrected, recast and revised many times. It accompanied Bulgakov through