The Master and Margarita 
by 

Mikhail Bulgakov

 

Soviet Ghost Stories

Stories, stories, all is stories: political stories, religious stories, scientific stories, even stories about stories. We live inside these stories. Like this one in The Master and Margarita. The story that we can more or less agree upon we call reality. But is it real?

Story-making and telling is what we do as human beings. Through stories we create meaning out of thin air, in the same way that plants create their food from light, and usually with about the same level of casual unconsciousness. We then learn to share meaning and thereby create language and societies. We call this culture and have little idea what it means or how it works.

What happens when stories, particularly stories about stories, are inhibited or forbidden? The most important result: society goes mad. And that part of society which becomes most mad is that of the professional story-tellers who, because they are the carriers of the essential human and cultural talent, become less than human. They are unable to tell the stories needed by the rest of us and enter a dream-like state of inexplicability and meaninglessness. 

The Master and Margarita is obviously a satire, a purposeful distortion of language to demonstrate its corrupt use. It is also obviously meant to recall the necessity for religious stories in a society that has degraded and mocked them. But for me the book is less about the corruption of Soviet society and its attitude toward the Christian religion and more about the even more fundamental beliefs that are the unspoken tenets of story-telling, that is to say, the philosophy of literature. 

In an important sense, literature is indistinguishable from religion. Religion cannot exist without it; but it is likely that literature could exist without religion. Literature precedes religion. Bulgakov notices this in his story of Christ before Pilate. 

“These good people,” the prisoner began, hastily added “Hegemon” and continued: “learnt nothing and muddled up all I said. In general, I’m beginning to worry that this muddle will continue for a very long time. And all because he records what I say incorrectly.”

This is a direct attack on the ‘veracity’ of the gospel of Matthew. Bulgakov here implicitly contrasts religion against literature in his expanded and reinterpreted version of the biblical story of Jesus's condemnation and death; and he comes down decisively for literature as the more fundamental mode of thinking. The only thing beyond a text is... another text.

This is not to say that literature should cause trouble for religion. The use of language is itself a religious experience even when it is used to parody religion as in Bulgakov's Communion of Sinners Ball and demonic Eucharist. Literature, consequently, exists as a spiritual (and social) rather than a material (and merely sensory) process. Materialism, of a Marxist, Capitalist, Scientific or any other sort, tells a story that cannot account for where its story comes from. Its causes cannot be enumerated and accounted for. Such a story is deficient and incomplete.

Stories do not appear to be 'in nature' but they do comment upon nature. It is not inaccurate to say that they come from 'elsewhere.' And it is this elsewhere that is both the source and guarantor of the integrity of the stories that get told. Without the existence of this infinitely fecund elsewhere, the realm of the spirit, there is no way to verify the stories we tell ourselves. As Bulgakov has a psychiatrist point out to one writer, "People can go around telling all sorts of stories! But you don’t have to believe everything!”

It is this spiritual elsewhere that Bulgakov has intruding on and disrupting Russian civil society. In time-honoured fashion, the intruders are portrayed as devils who are able to exploit the presumptuous conceits of this society, especially those of the literary elite of the MASSOLIT, the state-run literary guild. It is the writers who sense this intrusion first and it is they who are quite properly driven mad - or to their death - by it. 

Bulgakov's demonic characters are up-front in their challenge to cultural reality. They make a reductio ad absurdum by denying the reality of language and the society and the culture associated with it. "The seductive mystics lie, there are no Caribbean Seas on earth, and desperate filibusters do not sail them, and a corvette does not give chase, and cannon smoke does not spread above the waves. There is nothing, and never was there anything either!" This challenge of course passes over the heads of the Soviet Citizenry.

From the writers, the plague induced by constrained and distorted story-telling spreads to minor government officials. The local housing officer is the first casualty and he instinctively recognises the problem, "Comrades!... We’ve got unclean spirits in our building!” And he's right: the spiritual cannot be excluded, only deformed, by telling a story that denies the spirit. Such denial is patently a confirmation of what is being denied.

It is through entertainment, 1930's stage vaudeville, that the condition is spread through the wider population. The presumably hidden or at least repressed culture of Soviet consumer society is shown for what it is - impressed as deeply as in any capitalist society by the linguistic distortions of brand names and wealth without purpose. The 'watching mass' has no idea that it is being shown itself, literally exposed, in all its mendacious cupidity.

Even love, ultimately the cohesive force of marriage and family as well as society, is a product of language. It appears from that spiritual elsewhere, "as a murderer leaps out from under the ground in a side street” for the Master. Love may start with a look but it doesn’t progress beyond fantasy unless the look is the beginning of a shared story, interpreted by Margarita as an eternally fated event. The object that keeps them together while apart is of course the manuscript of the Master's book, an alternative gospel.

If the medieval troubadours are not enough evidence of the cultural determination of the meaning of love, surely the varieties of love articulated in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and accepted by generations since, clinch the case. Any society that attempts to limit what love, in all its variants, might mean is doomed by its own contradictions; and not just the Soviet variety. But it is Bulgakov’s conception of divine love that I find the most disturbing aspect of the piece.

Any theologically aware person must at some point confront the problem of evil. Evil demands a story. The monotheistic religions subscribe to the story line that not only the Creator but his creation are ‘good.’ How then does the obvious evil in the world come about? 

The existence of evil is typically explained with one of several largely inadequate theories: Evil is a spontaneous development of a rebellious force against the goodness of God and His works; Evil is not an autonomous force but merely the localised absence of the divine within creation; Evil is actually inherent in a world that was formed by a subsidiary god.

This last theory has a number of designations but is usually associated with the third century CE Persian Mani. So-called Manichaeism is the perennial thinking persons solution to the problem of evil since it accounts for the available facts of life without the need to invent a number of questionable metaphysical entities. It needs only one such beast - the flawed demiurge, a satanic figure who made a few mistakes in the way he shaped the cosmos and we have been dealing with the consequences ever since.

It becomes apparent in The Master and Margarita that Bulgakov rejects all the classical theological explanations for evil, especially Manichaeism. But the resulting theology is not easy to digest. He suggests that what appears as evil, the work of Satan in the world, is in fact the disguised work of God. Bulgakov's contemporary, Carl Jung, termed this the Shadow and conceived it as an integral part of the divine. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov echoes Jung exactly in Satan's criticism of the evangelist Matthew: 

"Would you be so kind as to give a little thought to the question of what your good would be doing if evil did not exist, and how the earth would look if the shadows were to disappear from it? After all, shadows come from objects and people."

In other words: God is Satan; Satan is God. And God/Satan cannot be avoided or escaped. Even within evil, God is present. He is present among the atrocious evil-doers of his demonic ball; among the crass bureaucrats and proletarian graspers in the audience of the Black Magician; among the scammers and players of the system who try to get one-up on their fellow citizens; in Pilate and in Judas. And presumably God is present and active therefore within and through Soviet society despite official protestations to the contrary. (The idea of Soviet Moscow as Paradise Lost is perhaps the greatest irony/truth that Bulgakov expresses in the book)

Of course Bulgakov does not make a theological argument. He tells a story. But in this story Satan as well as his devoted angels transform suddenly into their opposites, caring agents of human well-being; then into clownish Loki or Coyote trinitarian figures whose function is to play the fool with social institutions. There is no logic that can capture this divine turnaround from evil to love and play. But there is a narrative in which it can be described, and, on the basis of that description, be believed. 

Bulgakov’s technique, as well as the substance of his story, is not very different from, for example, the story of Exodus in which the God of Israel both allows the imprisonment of his people and then saves them from the situation he allowed to happen. The story also presents an alternative account of creation itself - as a text produced and protected by Adam and Eve, a couple which is bound together by it. Going beyond biblical bounds, religion itself is accounted for by the Master, the new Adam: 

"Of course, when people have been completely pillaged, like you and me, they seek salvation from a preternatural force!"

And he is immediately corrected by Margarita, the new Eve with eminent practicality, "Preternatural or not preternatural –isn’t it all the same? I’m hungry.”

The theme, almost a running joke, is clear: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord. The situation is dire but not hopeless. Exile from the Garden means freedom as well as toil. This is a theme that demands great faith to assert. More than I have had at times certainly.