Chapter 9: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita is an intriguing text in terms of its Gothic approach. Aside from its obvious Gothic terror, themes, motifs and atmosphere, the circumstances of the composition and final publication of the novel arouse a certain uncanny sensation for readers and critics alike. One of the most memorable comments made by this work is ‘manuscripts don’t burn’ (Bulgakov 2004, 326). Considered in light of the novel’s story – in which the Master, author of a controversial and mysteriously insightful book about Pontius Pilate, destroys his creation only to have it miraculously resurrected by the devil himself on Easter Sunday morning – this statement can be interpreted as a comment on textuality and the unique and unquantifiable ‘true’ nature of the written word. Considered in light of Bulgakov’s destruction of his own masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, in 1930, and its reconstruction and publication many years after his death, it would also seem that the dark magic at work in the story has reached out beyond the text to reverberate a Romantic philosophy of the enigmatic origins and immortality of art. As Andrew Barrat put it, it is as though ‘[w]e have been permitted to read the unwritable’ (Barrat 1987, 311). ‘Permitted’ is an interesting choice of word here in relation to the controversy that surrounds the novel. The initial censorship of the work is of note, but can be contextualised in terms of the extremely restrictive nature of the Soviet state during the Stalinist period. At this time, many writers were convicted for publishing ‘antagonistic’ works and even for publishing outside of the Soviet Union. However, in the years following its official publication in the Soviet Union in 1967, The Master and Margarita continued to be surrounded by controversy. Striking a note of resemblance with the renowned ‘Rushdie affair’, as recently as 2006, the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum in Moscow was gutted by a fire that was started by a fanatic who condemned the novel as satanic. According to one news report, the Bulgakov house was largely destroyed. The book had been 146 Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity condemned by the Orthodox Church as ‘the fifth gospel, that of Satan’,1 and the fanatical leader of a group of demonstrators destroyed the museum and its ‘pornographic’ contents. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, Bulgakov’s writing was far from anti-religious and in fact promoted ideas of spiritualism. The novel itself is much more anti-secularist than anti-Christian, and its misinterpretation echoes the distressing repercussions of fanatical, homogenising opinions, which so drastically effected Rushdie and which, in itself, is a focus for critique in the Gothic-postmodernist text. Critics have tirelessly debated the genre of The Master and Margarita but with no solid conclusion, maintaining generally, that it contains many heterogeneous elements and that it could easily be interpreted as a work of carnival, the fantastic, Menippean satire, allegory, miraculous fairytale and magical realism among many other categories. While many of these justified classifications may be applied to the text, it is quite a narrow consideration of the novel that overlooks the Gothic aspects of the work, and their relationship to its stylistically innovative narrative, which could arguably be considered postmodernist. This chapter will focus on this most important, overlooked feature of the work with a view to demonstrating its categorisation as a Gothic-postmodernist text and its influence on Rushdie and other writers. Tolstoy once claimed that significant art always creates its own forms that do not fit into the established hierarchy of genres (Weeks 1996, 75). Remarkably, Bulgakov may be generating the same effect in fitting together the various aspects of self-conscious writing (later to be termed postmodernism) with the traditional elements of the Gothic. Accepting that it does not fit into even our current ‘established hierarchy of genres’, we can, as critics, begin to explore the nature of its new form and what it meant for the development of the Gothic- postmodernist text. V. Lakshin comments, quite rightly, that we are justified in calling The Master and Margarita a philosophical novel (Weeks 1996,

1 See article at: http://www.silverfishbooks.com/2007/01/bulgakov-museum-sacked- by.html