Master and Margarita

Book Presentation

“All authority is violence over people,” Jesus tells Pontius Pilate in the novel, The Master and Margarita, by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). The novel was written during Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship in Russia though it was published only posthumously. Stalin doesn’t appear anywhere in the novel but he is present everywhere. Power is omnipresent in any dictatorship though the dictator seldom comes anywhere near the people. The orderliness that seems to exist in any dictatorship is only an appearance. Scratch that veneer of apparent discipline and the darkness of evil will explode like a detonated bomb.

Satan and his team of three devils – a heartless Koroviev who dresses more like a clown, Behemoth who has the shape of a mammoth black cat, and Azazello with a single fang – rule the roost in this fantastical novel. Does evil originate from Satan? ‘No’ is this novel’s emphatic answer. Satan describes himself as “part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” God would be impossible without Satan. God doesn’t appear in this novel except in the form of Jesus who is a character in a novel written by the Master. Jesus is quite helpless – and naïve – in the world run by people like Pilate and his master, the Roman Caesar. Towards the end of Bulgakov’s novel, Jesus emerges as the highest authority in the spiritual order and Satan obeys his wish/order to grant peace to the Master.

Satan is not the antithesis of Jesus or the invisible God. He is not the creator of evil in the human world. Man is evil at heart. Cowardice is the worst of the human evils. Satan only brings out that cowardice and other evils from man’s heart. Satan exposes the human evils, in other words. [Sometimes Satan is benevolent in this novel!]

It is cowardice of the people that really upholds dictatorships. If people possessed the virtue of courage, no dictator would be successful. People choose to be cowardly for various reasons – mostly selfishness and greed. Even the writers of Moscow are selfish and greedy. Instead of creating good and honest literature, these writers create propaganda for the dictator and present that as literary art. They are betraying themselves and art out of cowardice and its concomitant vices. In Bulgakov’s novel, Satan exposes the cowardly writers ruthlessly. The genuine writers, like the Master, suffer much pain.

The heroine, Margarita, appears only in the second half of the novel. She is the embodiment of courage. She is ready to take any risk for the sake of upholding what she regards as good. Moscow is cowardly and hence good people like the Master are left to endure agony. Margarita becomes the ultimate buttress of the Master. She is ready to become a witch just to be able to help the Master to complete his novel which is a genuine work of art unlike what most popular writers of Moscow were putting out.  

Because of what Margarita does, the Master regains his mental strength and completes the novel in which Jesus and Pilate are characters. But these characters come out of that novel and intertwine with Bulgakov’s characters in the end making The Master and Margarita a very complex novel.

There are three strands in this novel: (1) Satan and his acts; (2) Master-Margarita love; and (3) Pilate and Jesus. Only a genius like Bulgakov could have brought these strands together in the end to a breathtaking culmination of a work that has the supernatural rendering the human world absolutely farcical.

Mikhail Bulgakov

PS. I started reading this novel about a month ago and completed it just this afternoon. Reviewing a classic that was published more than half a century ago is rather presumptuous. But I thought this novel deserves to be paid attention to if only because of the kind of dictatorship I see emerging in my country.