Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of “the deepest contemplation of life in all its conditionality”. It is not by chance that his stage adaptations of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific “influences” stands the age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes — a tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov’s countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as Bulgakov’s novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita.
The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it, Bulgakov’s wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical situation from the same cultural basis.
Many observations from Bakhtin’s study seem to be aimed directly at Bulgakov’s intentions, none more so than his comment on Rabelais’s travesty of the “hidden meaning”, the ‘secret”, the “terrifying mysteries” of religion, politics and economics: “Laughter must liberate the gay truth of the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear, suffering, and violence.” The settling of scores is also part of the tradition of carnival laughter. Perhaps the most pure example is the Testament of the poet Francois Villon, who in the liveliest verse handed out appropriate “legacies” to all his enemies, thus entering into tradition and even earning himself a place in the fourth book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. So, too, Bakhtin says of Rabelais: In his novel ... he uses the popular-festive system of images with its charter of freedoms consecrated by many centuries; and he uses it to inflict a severe punishment upon his foe, the Gothic age ... In this setting of consecrated rights Rabelais attacks the fundamental dogmas and sacraments, the holy of holies of medieval ideology.
And he comments further on the broad nature of this tradition: For thousands of years the people have used these festive comic images to express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth, and their highest hopes and aspirations. Freedom was not so much an exterior right as it was the inner content of these images. It was the thousand-year-old language of feariessness, a language with no reservations and omissions, about the world and about power.
Bulgakov drew on this same source in settling his scores with the custodians of official literature and official reality.
The novel’s form excludes psychological analysis and historical commentary. Hence the quickness and pungency of Bulgakov’s writing. At the same time, it allows Bulgakov to exploit all the theatricality of its great scenes — storms, flight, the attack of vampires, all the antics of the demons Koroviev and Behemoth, the séance in the Variety theatre, the ball at Satan’s, but also the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, the crucifixion as witnessed by Matthew Levi, the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane.
Bulgakov’s treatment of Gospel figures is the most controversial aspect of The Master and Margarita and has met with the greatest incomprehension.
Yet his premises are made clear in the very first pages of the novel, in the dialogue between Woland and the atheist Berlioz. By the deepest irony of all, the “prince of this world” stands as guarantor of the “other” world. It exists, since he exists. But he says nothing directly about it. Apart from divine revelation, the only language able to speak of the “other” world is the language of parable. Of this language Kafka wrote, in his parable “On Parables”: Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if it was worth the trouble; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least. All these parables really set out to say simply that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that and of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You win.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality. In parable you lose.
A similar dialogue lies at the heart of Bulgakov’s novel. In it there are those who belong to parable and those who belong to reality. There are those who go over and those who do not. There are those who win in parable and become parables themselves, and there are those who win in reality. But this reality belongs to Woland. Its nature is made chillingly clear in the brief scene when he and Margarita contemplate his special globe. Woland says: “For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by the ocean? Look, it’s filling with fire. A war has started there. If you look closer, you’ll see the details.”
Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of land spread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a relief map. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village near it. A little house the size of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox.
Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house flew up along with a cloud of black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of the little two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke pouring from it.
Bringing her eye still closer, Margarita made out a small female figure lying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little child with outstretched arms.
That’s it,” Woland said, smiling, “he had no time to sin. Abaddon’s work is impeccable.”
When Margarita asks which side this Abaddon is on, Woland replies: “He is of a rare impartiality and sympathizes equally with both sides of the fight. Owing to that, the results are always the same for both sides.”
There are others who dispute Woland’s claim to the power of this world.
They are absent or all but absent from The Master and Margarita. But the reality of the world seems to be at their disposal, to be shaped by them and to bear their imprint. Their names are Caesar and Stalin. Though absent in person, they are omnipresent. Their imposed will has become the measure of normality and self-evidence. In other words, the normality of this world is imposed terror. And, as the story of Pilate shows, this is by no means a twentieth-century phenomenon. Once terror is identified with the world, it becomes invisible. Bulgakov’s portrayal of Moscow under Stalin’s terror is remarkable precisely for its weightless, circus-like theatricality and lack of pathos. It is a sub-stanceless reality, an empty suit writing at a desk.
The citizens have adjusted to it and learned to play along as they always do. The mechanism of this forced adjustment is revealed in the chapter recounting “Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream”, in which prison, denunciation and betrayal become yet another theatre with a kindly and helpful master of ceremonies. Berlioz, the comparatist, is the spokesman for this “normal” state of affairs, which is what makes his conversation with Woland so interesting. In it he is confronted with another reality which he cannot recognize. He becomes “unexpectedly mortal”. In the story of Pilate, however, a moment of recognition does come. It occurs during Pilate’s conversation with Yeshua, when he sees the wandering philosopher’s head float off and in its place the toothless head of the aged Tiberius Caesar.
This is the pivotal moment of the novel. Pilate breaks off his dialogue with Yeshua, he does not “go over”, and afterwards must sit like a stone for two thousand years waiting to continue their conversation.
Parable cuts through the normality of this world only at moments.
These moments are preceded by a sense of
dread, or else by a presentiment of something good. The first variation is Berlioz’s meeting with Woland. The second is Pilate’s meeting with Yeshua. The third is the ‘self-baptism” of the poet Ivan Homeless before he goes in pursuit of the mysterious stranger. The fourth is the meeting of the master and Margarita.
These chance encounters have eternal consequences, depending on the response of the person, who must act without foreknowledge and then becomes the consequences of that action.
The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the master, becomes the latter’s ‘disciple” and continues his work, is present at almost every turn of the novel’s action, and appears finally in the epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of “normal” reality, as a historian who “knows everything”, but each year, with the coming of the spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly.
Richard Pevear
A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements
At his death, Bulgakov left The Master and Margarita in a slightly unfinished state. It contains, for instance, certain inconsistencies – two versions of the ‘departure” of the master and Margarita, two versions of Yeshua’s entry into Yershalaim, two names for Yeshua’s native town. His final revisions, undertaken in October of 1939, broke off near the start of Book Two. Later he dictated some additions to his wife, Elena Sergeevna, notably the opening paragraph of Chapter 32 (“Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth!”). Shortly after his death in 1940, Elena Sergeevna made a new typescript of the novel. In 1965, she prepared another typescript for publication, which differs slightly from her 1940 text. This 1965 text was published by Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967. However, the editors of the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages. These cut portions immediately appeared in samizdat (unofficial Soviet ‘self-publishing”), were published by Scherz Verlag in Switzerland in 1967, and were then included in the Possev Verlag edition (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969) and the YMCA-Press edition (Paris, 1969). In 1975 a new and now complete edition came out in Russia, the result of a comparison of the already published editions with materials in the Bulgakov archive. It included additions and changes taken from written corrections on other existing typescripts. The latest Russian edition (1990) has removed the most important of those additions, bringing the text close once again to Elena Sergeevna’s 1965 typescript. Given the absence of a definitive authorial text, this process of revision is virtually endless. However, it involves changes that in most cases have little bearing for a translator.
The present translation has been made from the text of the original magazine publication, based on Elena Sergeevna’s 1965 typescript, with all cuts restored as in the Possev and YMCA-Press editions. It is complete and unabridged.
The translators wish to express their gratitude to M. O. Chudakova for her advice on the text and to Irina Kronrod for her help in preparing the Further Reading.
R. P., L. V.
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA
“... who are you, then?”
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
Goethe, Faust[1]
* Book One *
Chapter 1. Never Talk with Strangers
At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds.[2] One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neady shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.
The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz,[3] editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, called Massolit[4] for short, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym of Homeless.[5]
Once in the shade of the barely greening lindens, the writers dashed first thing to a brighdy painted stand with the sign: “Beer and Soft Drinks.”
Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening. There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At that hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was empty.
“Give us seltzer,” Berlioz asked.
“There is no seltzer,” the woman in the stand said, and for some reason became offended.
“Is there beer?” Homeless inquired in a rasping voice.
“Beer’ll be delivered towards evening,” the woman replied.
“Then what is there?” asked Berlioz.
“Apricot soda, only warm,” said the woman.
“Well, let’s have it, let’s have it! ...”
The soda produced an abundance of yellow foam, and the air began to smell of a barber-shop. Having finished drinking, the writers immediately started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench face to the pond and back to Bronnaya.
Here the second oddity occurred, touching Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart gave a thump and dropped away somewhere for an instant, then came back, but with a blunt needle lodged in it. Besides that, Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to flee the Ponds at once without looking back.
Berlioz looked around in anguish, not understanding what had frightened him. He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought: “What’s the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart’s acting up ... I’m overworked ... Maybe it’s time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk ...”[6]
And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked jockey’s cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air ... A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy.
The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and thought in consternation: “This can’t be! ...”
But, alas, it was, and the long, see-through citizen was swaying before him to the left and to the right without touching the ground.
Here terror took such possession of Berlioz that he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that it was all over, the phantasm had dissolved, the checkered one had vanished, and with that the blunt needle had popped out of his heart.
“Pah, the devil!” exclaimed the editor. “You know, Ivan, I nearly had heatstroke just now! There was even something like a hallucination ...” He attempted to smile, but alarm still jumped in his eyes and his hands trembled. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief and, having said rather cheerfully: “Well, and so ...”, went on with the conversation interrupted by their soda-drinking.
This conversation, as was learned afterwards, was about Jesus Christ.
The thing was that the editor had commissioned from the poet a long anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had written this poem, and in a very short time, but unfortunately the editor was not at all satisfied with it. Homeless had portrayed the main character of his poem – that is, Jesus – in very dark colours, but nevertheless the whole poem, in the editor’s opinion, had to be written over again. And so the editor was now giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, with the aim of underscoring the poet’s essential error.
It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolaevich down – the descriptive powers of his talent or a total unfamiliarity with the question he was writ
ing about – but his Jesus came out, well, completely alive, the once-existing Jesus, though, true, a Jesus furnished with all negative features.
Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction, the most ordinary mythology.
It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and in his conversation very skilfully pointed to ancient historians – for instance, the famous Philo of Alexandria[7] and the brilliantly educated Flavius Josephus[8] – who never said a word about the existence of Jesus. Displaying a solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed the poet, among other things, that the passage in the fifteenth book of Tacitus’s famous Annals,[9] the forty-fourth chapter, where mention is made of the execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious interpolation.
The poet, for whom everything the editor was telling him was new, listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his pert green eyes on him, and merely hiccuped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath.
There’s not a single Eastern religion,” Berlioz was saying, “in which, as a rule, an immaculate virgin did not give birth to a god. And in just the same way, without inventing anything new, the Christians created their Jesus, who in fact never lived. It’s on this that the main emphasis should be placed ...”
Berlioz’s high tenor rang out in the deserted walk, and as Mikhail Alexandrovich went deeper into the maze, which only a highly educated man can go into without risking a broken neck, the poet learned more and more interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris,[10] a benevolent god and the son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Tammoz,[11] and about Marduk,[12] and even about a lesser known, terrible god, Vitzliputzli,”[13] once greatly venerated by the Aztecs in Mexico. And just at the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet how the Aztecs used to fashion figurines of Vitzli-putzli out of dough — the first man appeared in the walk.