The Master and Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov wasn’t all that bothered about the future, even on his deathbed. The last photos of him, taken in his Moscow apartment in February 1940, show no trace of fear. Although his face is gaunt and his once luxurious hair thinning and unkempt, he looks sanguine, almost cheerful – a stark contrast with his third wife, Yelena, sitting by his side. Right up until a month before his death he was still making corrections to The Master and Margarita – his most famous novel – even though he must have known that it had no chance of being published in his lifetime. Despite a litany of failures in recent years, he was consumed by an insatiable longing to write, to create for the hereafter. But the past – that bothered him.

Its unreliability gnawed at him. More so than almost any other theme – religion, theatre, even satire – his concern for the fragility of memory and the elusiveness of historical truth runs through his writings like a scarlet thread. It shaped his understanding of both the Russian Civil War and the rule of Stalin. It underpinned his conception of religion and human nature. It affected how he viewed his native Ukraine. And it was still troubling him at the very end.

Links in the chain

Bulgakov was not a natural historian. Born in 1891 into a comfortable middle-class family in Kyiv, he spent his youth cocooned by an amiable present. Although his father, a professor of comparative religion, died while Bulgakov was still a teenager, his mother carefully nurtured his passion for music, theatre, and books – especially the Russian classics. Even after he settled on a career in medicine it was this intense love of 19th-century culture which bounded his horizons. He was instinctively conservative. An ethnic Russian in a subject Ukraine, he relished the certainties of tsarist rule and had a natural, if not unqualified, fondness for tradition. Yet he did not regard the past as worthy of special comment, much less as 
a matter of concern.

All that changed in 1917. Following the October Revolution, Ukraine was thrown into chaos. The new Bolshevik government found itself fighting not only the Germans, but also White armies, loyal to the deposed tsar. In the hope of consolidating their rule, Lenin decided to make peace with Germany. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, the whole of Ukraine was ceded to the kaiser. A new puppet government was set up in Kyiv, known as the hetmanate, under the aristocratic Pavlo Petrovych Skoropadskyi. Rather than bringing stability, however, this only made things worse. When Germany was compelled to sign the Armistice on the Western Front, Skoropadskyi’s regime quickly collapsed. As he fled, forces under the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petlyura marched into Kyiv only to be driven out by the Bolsheviks a few weeks later. And on it went. For three years, instability raged.

Bulgakov was appalled. Having returned to Kyiv in February 1918 after being released from his position as a country doctor, he claimed to have witnessed no fewer than ten changes of regime. He was consumed by a powerful, irrepressible nostalgia. ‘Ah, why was I born so late? Why was I not born a hundred years ago?’ he asked his sister. The confusion also left him with a new and acute awareness of how fragile the past now was. Since the Bolsheviks had seized power, his memories had become alarmingly unreliable. As he later noted in his novel Black Snow:

It is no time at all since something was happening yet to try to recreate the event in an orderly sequence proves to be utterly impossible. The links have been dropped out of the chain. You remember some of it in a vivid flash, but the rest has crumbled, scattered, leaving nothing in your memory but random litter and a shower of rain.

Once stable, the past had become fragile and frightening. Events, moments, even people started to seem unreal, almost dreamlike.

No such man

Bulgakov’s shift in attitude is most vividly apparent in his novel The White Guard. Completed in 1924, a few years after Bulgakov had abandoned medicine to pursue a literary career in Moscow, this semi-autobiographical work narrates the experiences of the Turbin family during the ‘great and terrible year of Our Lord 1918’. It begins with the three Turbin siblings – Alexei, Elena, and Nikolai – mourning the death of their mother. Seeking some sense of normality, they try to go on living as before. In their comfortable drawing room in Kyiv, they use the same crockery, and the same clock ticks reassuringly on the mantelpiece, just as it always has. But outside, things are no longer the same. As the hetmanate crumbles, everything becomes ‘filthy, bloody, and senseless’. Even the passage of time becomes confusing and strange.

Each of the siblings is sucked into the unfolding civil war. Alexei, the eldest, is a doctor pressed into the hetman’s service; Elena’s cowardly husband, sensing the imminent fall of Skoropadskyi’s regime, flees; and Nikolai, a cadet barely out of school, is swept up in the fighting. Yet they struggle to make sense of anything. Petlyura seems as unreal as a fairytale villain. He seems to have no past. Although Bulgakov knew perfectly well that he had been a famous journalist long before he became a military leader, no one in Kyiv knows anything about his background, and the closer he gets to the city the less real he becomes. ‘There was no such man. Rubbish, mere legend, a pure mirage.’

The Turbins can’t even trust their own memories. At the end of the book Alexei, recovering from a near-fatal wound, wonders whether Petlyura had been just a dream. Had it not been for ‘the stiffening corpse of a Jew’ lying in the snow, Bulgakov notes, there would have been no evidence ‘that Petlyura … had really existed’.

So incomprehensible is the past that it assumes an almost transcendental quality. Omens and portents loom large. Heaven and hell are never far away. And events only make sense when cast as a struggle between God and the devil – even though no sane person seems to believe in them. This is most tellingly illustrated when a syphilitic man comes to Alexei for help. He explains that the hetman was the precursor to the Antichrist, and that the Antichrist himself – in the person of the Bolsheviks – is on his way to Moscow. Alexei, of course, dismisses his ravings out of hand; but ironically, the poor, addle-headed man is the only one who sees clearly what has actually been happening.

Devils and madmen

What, then, is the role of the historian? If memory is unreliable and the past elusive, what does history – as an interpretation of past events – look like? What place is there for truth? What even is truth?

These questions preoccupied Bulgakov throughout the 1920s and 1930s – and perhaps with good reason. After the end of the civil war and Stalin’s rise to power, he found himself in a peculiar situation. On the strength of The White Guard’s success he was invited to write for the Moscow Arts Theatre and quickly rose to prominence as a dramatist. Most of his works from this period were on overtly historical themes – the life of Molière, the last days of Alexander Pushkin’s life, the civil war in Crimea, even one which had Ivan the Terrible transported to the 20th century, and they reflected what he regarded as abiding cultural truths. He had plenty of admirers, too, including Stalin. Yet his plays were routinely banned and his historical works, in particular, were regularly attacked in the press. This left him puzzled and dispirited. He was frustrated with the mediocrity of more ‘successful’ writers, bemused by the communists’ attitude towards the literary past, and often unable to make sense of what had happened 
to him.

The Master and Margarita was his solution. Strange, fantastical, and brilliant, it picks up from where Alexei’s syphilitic patient left off in The White Guard. On a warm spring evening, the devil comes to Moscow. Together with his assistants – including a large talking cat and two comically hideous demons – he proceeds to turn the city upside down. Parodying the miracles of Jesus, he pokes fun at the Muscovites’ venality. Money rains down on theatre audiences, only to disappear the minute it is spent; sane people are turned mad; and a lecherous man is turned into a pig. The only people not caught up in this are the Master – a former professor of history, who was confined to a madhouse after burning the only manuscript of his novel – and Margarita, his lover.

The story of Woland (as the devil is known) is interwoven with another – that of Pontius Pilate. At first, this is narrated by Woland himself. Pushing his way into a conversation between the editor Mikhail Berlioz and the poet Ivan Bezdomny, he gives a bewildering account of Pilate’s interrogation of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, that is to say, Jesus. Only later do we discover that this is actually the first part of the Master’s lost novel. And, as Berlioz points out, this is totally  different from the account given in the Gospel of Matthew. But it is true nonetheless – as Bezdomny realises after being driven mad. The various chapters, charting Yeshua’s crucifixion and Pilate’s growing regret, still fit with the basic details of Jesus’ life as we know them and are embroidered with telling details about life in first-century Jerusalem. And as the two storylines converge, Woland allows Margarita the opportunity to pardon Pilate, condemned to eternal lament atop a mountain, and to reunite him with Yeshua once again.

Bulgakov’s novel has so many layers that it defies easy interpretation. But underlying its many twists and turns there is nevertheless a simple, if chilling message: that in times of upheaval, when the past fragments and even memory fails, it is the historian’s curse to write fictions which are true, but which no one believes except madmen and the devil.

• Born 15 May 1891, Kyiv, Ukraine 

• Died 10 March 1940, Moscow, Russia 

• Notable works The White Guard (1925) l Black Snow (1965) l The Master and Margarita (1967)

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick.