Bulgakov's Sentimental Devil

...Gods, gods'' says the man in the cloak, turning his haughty face to his companion 'What a vulgar execution' But tell me, please tell me,' and his face is no longer haughty but pleading, 'it never happened' I beg you, tell me, it never happened...

...Of course, it never happened, his companion answers in a hoarse voice 'You imagined it' ". If this is satiric playfulness on Bulgakov's part it is sadly self-defeating The suffocating effects of a dicta-tonal regime on artistic expression are well-known Less well-known are its insidious effects on a first-rate writer such as Bulgakov The artfulness of this novel is often breath-taking--its speed, charm, and incredible inventiveness, its comic agility and brilliance Yet The Master and Margarita is far from a masterpiece The horror of its devilish detail is not matched by a correspondingly profound insight into the basest human motives Pontius Pilate, the weary bureaucrat, typifies all too completely the weary, rather cynical attitude that Bulgakov can only mask at the end with an unpersuasive sentimentality The theme he has chosen to elaborate is not a new one in modern Russian literature--one can find it in the poet Alexander Blok and in philosophical thinkers such as Shestov and Rozanov In comparison, Bulgakov's vision is as cramped and petty as the Moscow he has chosen to depict The truth is that he is not a philosophical writer at all, he is a writer of an almost indelibly realistic turn of mind, with that valuable feeling for the opaqueness and substantiality of things, persons, ideas, which runs like iron through all of the best modem Russian writing His fantastic vein is always, or should always be, grounded in fact I prefer his short novel, The Fatal Eggs, with its unpretentious comic sweep, to the moon-dazed musings m The Master and Margarita...

...Most, but fortunately not all Bulgakov had healthy hatreds that he brilliantly worked into his fast-moving plot He hated editors, literary parasites, the whole machinery of bureaucracy which the triumphant Revolution placed over the artist to tempt and harass him Bulgakov knew this world inside out, and the picture he limned is unforgettable--the villas given as plums to the most tractable, the vacations, the sumptuous meals, the ostracism and hounding that even the slightest independence aroused in the watchdogs of the flesh-pots of literary expression The milieu he evokes is strangely middle-class--theatrical entrepreneurs, janitors, barmen, literary hacks--the lower and upper reaches of that segment of the professional intelligentsia and their hangers-on and servants which somehow managed to survive the October overthrow The majority of them are mediocrities, and the Devil has a field-day toying with their greeds, pettinesses, occupational idiocies In Bulgakov's eyes, the Russian Revolution was the occasion for the triumph of the second-rate, it reflected the eternal meanness and shabbiness of the human condition But he has not written a political novel, in the sense that Victor Serge's or Ignazio Silone's novels are pohtical...

...Of the two versions I would recommend the Grove edition, despite the cuts, because of the superiority of Mirra Gmsburg's translation, it adheres faithfully to the grainy, unexpected texture of the original prose Glenny's translation, though more glib--fulfilling the usual editorial demand for a smoothly readable text--too often turns Bulgakov's originality into something much more pallid and less impressive Let me give one example Here is Mirra Gmsburg's opening for the crucial second chapter "In the early morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, wearing a white cloak with a blood-red lining and walking with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, came out into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great " And here is Michael Glenny's "Early in the morning on the fourteenth of the spring month of Nisan the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, m a white cloak lined with blood red, emerged with his shuffling cavalryman's walk into the arcade connecting the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great " The difference is almost imperceptible, but what Tolstoy called "that little touch" which characterizes art is captured more faithfully in the Ginsburg translation...

...Two versions of his book have been issued here (Grove, 402 pp, $5 95, Harper & Row, 394 pp, $5 95) The Grove edition, translated by Mirra Gins-burg, is based on the Russian installments, the Harper & Row edition, supposedly uncensored and more complete, contains an additional 23,000 words and is translated by Michael Glenny I have examined the cuts and found them for the most part innocuous, except for two crucial moments a page in which the Devil, at his magic show, asks the Moscow audience whether, along with the obvious technological changes introduced by the Revolution, they themselves have changed inwardly, in their spirits (a highly political question, and perhaps the only one proposed throughout the novel), and the concluding paragraph of the penultimate chapter, where we learn that pardon has at last been granted "to the astrologer's son, fifth Procurator of Judea, the cruel Pontius Pilate ". Pontius Pilate is the most moving and fully realized character in the novel, indeed the only real character The Devil, beside him, seems a necessary device, the Master, who is writing a novel about Pontius Pilate, a cliche of the uprooted artist, while his mistress, Margarita, does not achieve individuality even when she becomes a witch in order to rescue her beloved Master The second chapter, where Bulgakov recreates the meeting between Jesus and Pontius Pilate with overpowering imaginative freshness, is unfortunately the high point of the book Nothing after that, including the working out ot the Jesus story as a sort of supernatural echo to the earthly action m Moscow, ever reaches the same pitch of psychological insight...

...In the Epilogue this sentimental view is prolonged in the dreams of the clerk Ivan Nikolayevich, who is still suffering from his transformation into a pig by one of the Devil's witches After his drug injection, Ivan Nikolayevich has pleasant dreams about Pilate and Jesus "A wide path of moonlight stretches from the bed to the window, a man m a white cloak with blood-red lining ascends the road and walks toward the moon Next to him is a young man in a torn chiton, with a badly bruised face They talk heatedly about something, debating, trying to reach an agreement...

...But in this whole supernatural section of his novel, Bulgakov appears to be telling us, indirectly, glancingly, though quite explicitly, what he thinks of the Russian Revolution and the great changes it has supposedly brought about The real drama for him took place long ago in Jerusalem, when a frightened Jesus in Herod's palace pleaded for the goodness in man, when Judas took his spy's silver and was murdered, when Pontius Pilate, driven by state and material necessity, played out his role as the emissary of power and the unwilling representative of evil It is precisely Pilate's unwillingness that distinguishes Bulgakov's view of the struggle between good and evil Pilate would have preferred not to execute Jesus, for in their short interview Jesus has been the first man to reveal Pilate to himself and to speak honestly But Pilate represents the Roman power which demands that "the rebel" be crucified He complies, out of cowardice, and spends the next 2,000 years racked with headaches and remorse His pardon comes when the Master and Margarita plead with Devil for his deliverance, and the Devil has a moment of charity...

...In this hierarchy, the Devil proves to be the master of the universe God is nowhere to be seen, although fleeting mention is made of him at the start On his visit to Moscow, the Devil assumes the guise of a consultant in magic, his grotesque retinue resembles a vaudeville troupe, and the demonic pranks they engage in devolve entirely upon the necessities and trivial greeds occupying the minds of the harassed Moscovites after 10 years of the revolutionary regime--suitable living quarters, fine clothes, and the foreign currency to buy them All this is an echo of the nep period and probably explains the recent publication in the Soviet literary magazine Moskva of a censored version of the original text For Bulgakov's novel, no matter how much he revised it, is tied to that long-gone period of the '20s and most of its satire has lost its bite...

...Bulgakov's Sentimental Devil By Raymond Rosenthal Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita was written in the late '20s, when the Bolshevik Revolution--originally seen by the literati as a natural cataclysm that would sweep away the debris of the old world-had settled into a banal routine under the control of mean and petty bureaucrats Bulgakov managed to survive the Stalin purges by retiring into silence He is supposed to have worked on this most ambitious of his novels until his death in 1940, continuously retouching and improving the original draft Yet the impact of the first great wave of disillusionment with the Revolution's aims and ideals among the intellectuals is the most notable aspect of the novel, despite the gaiety of its excited movement, its almost baroque inventon, and its curious spiritual hierarchy...

...So bulgakov takes a rather sentimental view of the august contest between good and evil The Devil has contempt for human beings, in the approved classical tradition, yet he finds that their inexplicably sudden impulses of charity are rather charming and should now and then be indulged No other explanation can be given for the climax of the novel, and there is in fact a somewhat ludicrous contrast between the immensity of the scene--a mountaintop overlooking all of history--and the pat, consolatory ending that Bulgakov has contrived...