Due to Soviet censorship, Mikhail Bulgakov never saw his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, published. In 1967, twenty years after he was safely dead, it was published in a trimmed version with the omitted sections published underground, through grassroots copiers (samizdat) in what sounds like an early politically motivated sneakernet.
The devil, who is called Professor Woland and claims to be a black magician, and his shape shifting minions Azazello, Behemoth the cat, Koroviev, have come to Moscow, and they’re turning the town upside down. Woland primarily works his magic on people’s greed, and then uses their pride against them. He orchestrates it beautifully. He cons people by finding what they most desire, then he tweaks it. They don’t say anything about it because they don’t want to be found out. So it works the way any good con does.
Woland can tell the future, and pretends to influence it, though we know he’s just a pawn from the novel’s epigraph:
“… who are you, then?”
“I am part of that power
which eternally wills evil
and eternally works good.”
That’s an exchange between Faust and the demon Mephistopheles, from Goethe’s Faust, and forms an apt canopy overshadowning the book. Woland is a mischief maker; almost all of what he does is uncover the sins of the people who try to cheat or resist him, usually through the agency of his three demon servants or Margarita, the woman who gives her soul to him without much deliberation. But he never does anything too bad, and if he does, it’s reversable.
The Master and Margarita trumpets the presence of the devil, but doesn’t mention God at all unless you count Yeshua, and he’s not much of a God. The supernatural lacks in substance. The devil isn’t that bad, and he deals in faerie gold and phantom pranks, which are annoying at best. Even the fellow who gets decapitated in the magic act gets his head back. And Yeshua isn’t that good—he’s diluted, and owns only some small power, most of which is compassion. Please don’t misunderstand: compassion is wonderful, and a worthy and central attribute, but when Yeshua proclaims again and again that all people are good, and persists in calling everyone a “good man,” he undermines himself, his credibility and authority, and distances himself from any true conception of God. What does “good” mean, then? If all men are good, but they do evil things, haven’t we stripped the meaning from that word? Either he’s claiming there is no evil, only insanity, as Clarence Darrow did in his closing remarks for the Leopold and Loeb case, or he’s saying men’s righteousness is separate from his actions, which is impossible apart from grace. That’s the whole point of grace, that our actions aren’t counted to us, that Christ both takes away our sin and gives us his righteousness.
There are other people who have written at length on the subject of grace and righteousness, and Bulgakov’s novel isn’t where I’m going to go first to renew my perspective on that. (Though, if I find a nugget, I’ll take it. Content over delivery.) But I’m more interested in what he has to say about stories. The master is eaten alive by his novel; the story he writes is completely true and Margarita, his lover, is obsessed with it. She claims to also loves the man, and I think she does, but she’s stripped him of a name, and gives him a title instead, all due to this novel. To live and die on the merits of your fiction is pretty scary, but real and true and necessary nonetheless. The master despairs; he’s overcome by fear, burns the manuscript, and commits himself to an asylum. Later, once Margarita has become a witch, she begs Woland to return the master to her on the merit of his novel. The devil fetches the master and expresses some desire to read his book, but the master answers:
‘Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, `because I burned it in the stove.’
‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ‘that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.’ He turned to Behemoth and said, ‘Come on. Behemoth, let’s have the novel.’
The cat produces the manuscript, which the Master burned in his stove. This sentiment is particularly interesting to me, given that Bulgakov burned the first draft of The Master and Margarita. The quote apparently took on some significance in Soviet literary culture, as a sort of mantra for the times. It speaks to me about the durability of story as well, in the sense of Jeremiah’s burning bones. Some stories don’t go away, and if you don’t tell them, somebody else will, or you’ll go crazy from holding it in.
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