May the Devil take you!
It is said that Stalin loved Bulgakov's pièce, even though they spoke of problems and high-bourgeois, counter-revolutionary lives. But we, perhaps, care little about this. Rather, it is good to get used to paradoxes and curtains from the very beginning.
1940. Spring is almost arriving in Moscow when Michail Afanas'evich Bulgakov, a country doctor, playwright, and novelist, born in Kyiv forty-nine years prior to a family of Orthodox theologians, dies from a disease he diagnosed himself. For at least a decade, his obsession has been a novel about the devil (such a typically Russian obsession, you might say). A novel he writes, violently destroys, and feverishly rewrites, expands, and revises till the grave; and of which, vertiginously, his own novel speaks.
Spring is appearing in Moscow while Bulgakov, ten years earlier, throws into the stove the first draft of his novel.
And it is (and forever will be) spring on the Patriarch Ponds when the devil, in the guise of a stranger or the consultant of black magic Professor Woland, arrives in Moscow under the shadow of linden trees prophesying the accidental death of Michail Alexandrovich Berlioz, director of the Massolit, a very refined association of Moscow literati with its headquarters at Griboyedov.
There is a Master in the book, whose name we do not know: his lover Margarita has called him this. The Master is the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate; a novel that we read within Bulgakov's novel told by the devil himself and which tells of itself from the outside. Like Bulgakov with his manuscript, indeed, the Master has thrown into the stove, with both a ritual and mad gesture, his novel; as, both inside the book and out, it was utterly indigestible to the Russian reader of those years.
Finally, it is spring in Yerushalayim when, on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the scent of roses makes the migraine of the cruel seventh procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate, unbearable.
A novel, the Master's, about Pontius Pilate and the death by crucifixion of Joshua Ha-nozri; a novel, Bulgakov's, about the devil's and his entourage's adventures in post-revolutionary Moscow under Comrade Stalin, proletarian in facade and petty bourgeois in reality. A classism not unlike today's, in the end, though masked by egalitarianism. And, to unmask it, Woland's disdainful entourage is tasked, a clique of masks themselves; but masks that are estranging, cynical, and irreverent.
Do not believe that the devil impersonates the tempter of Christian tradition, the serpent on the forbidden tree. Quite the opposite: Bulgakov is not Dostoevsky. The devil is the unsettling, the trickster, the foreigner — both alien and estranging — who, irrevocably and without explanation, tears away every pretense and mask from humans' faces, rendering them thus naked and transparent, casting a shadow over conventional falsehoods and brutishness, and on the contrary highlighting, finally visible to all, their misery and pettiness.
This swarm of intriguers, literary critics, and writers enslaved to pseudo-proletarian fashion, of theater and magazine directors, of petty bureaucrats, profiteers, and typically Russian and Gogolian small men; they too are masks, universal types, familiar to everyone in their pettiness. Well, it is the black magic show and its unmasking orchestrated by the devil's entourage, specifically the hulking sparrow-beard cat Behemoth and choir leader Korov'ev, that gives a metaphorical kick in the backside to this swarm of (in)humanity.
There is thus a world within a world: a novel about a novel and about a corner of the world, though deformed under the lens of the inexplicable and the grotesque, experienced by Bulgakov himself, so that, when seen clearly, the Master in the book and his author outside are masks as well.
Of a dizzying intertwining of fictional planes, between the world outside the page and the world within; between a world acted and upheaved by Woland and his entourage and a world, opened ex abrupto, from twenty centuries prior; between what this clique of characters acts, here and now, and what they are outside the stage. Of the contemplated suicide of a woman with sad yellow flowers in contrast with a black overcoat and her Master, in voluntary exile in a psychiatric institution outside Moscow. Of an intersection of sadness, a name, and a manuscript burnt in the stove (but we know manuscripts don't burn). Of dirty tricks, inexplicable disappearances, and apricot waters. Of a devil who, like Comrade Stalin, intervened in favor of a writer. Of a Moscow from the '30s, in short, which is but a crimson proscenium curtain, opening and closing on the paradox of living.
This, and more that I do not dare to recount, is what the Master and Margarita speaks about.
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