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Chapter One: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
- Northwestern University Press
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Chapter One Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita The more I wrote the stronger the desire grew in me to be a contemporary writer. But at the same time I saw that it was impossible both to depict contemporaneity and to find myself in that highly tuned and tranquil state of mind necessary for a work of great and harmonious effort. The present is too alive, too moving, too exasperating; the writer's pen imperceptibly turns to satire. -Nikolai Gogol (quoted by Bulgakov in a letter to Stanislavsky) THERE ARE, perhaps, as many ways to compare Bulgakov to Gogol as there are works in Bulgakov's oeuvre.1 Especially in The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov shares Gogol's uncanny ability to gesture toward the spiritual void beneath a comic, satirical surface. As both Gogol and Bulgakov discovered, satire sometimes becomes its own obstacle. According to popular legend, Gogol did not complete parts two and three of Dead Souls, because he was unable to overcome the talent for satire that served him so well in the "Inferno," the wasteland of part one. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov also undertakes this challenge of combining the comic and the serious, the superficial and the essential. "Art would like to stop being pretence and play," says Leverkiihn in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, "it would like to become knowledge."2 Satire is all surface and pretence, knowledge is depth and sincerity. Yet in spite of its satire, The Master and Margarita is consumed with this desire that art "become knowledge ," that literature reveal the truth. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov seems to long for a time when essential truths about people and about the universe were the exclusive trade of the author. Themes of selfhood and tradition are detectable even in the epigraph to The Master and Margarita: "Say at last, who are you? / I am part of that power / Which wills forever evil/And does forever good."3 The question asked here is not only one ofidentification-who are youP-but also one of identity-give an account of yourself. Riddles of personal identity and the self thus initiate a novel in which the central hero is both eponymous and 3 The Author as Hero anonymous. Even the paradoxical response of Goethe's Mephistopheles, who is unnamed in the epigraph, is relevant, for one of the great paradoxalists of Russian fiction is Ivan's devil in The Brothers Karamazov. 4 Thus a second, hidden identity for the epigraph's respondent is produced, one that is bound closely to the Russian literary tradition. Identity in The Master and Margarita often emerges through the novel's dialogue with tradition. Bulgakov's attitude toward tradition in The Master and Margarita suggests, moreover, that there is a therapeutic potential in the literary past: one enters into a dialogue with the past in order to heal the self that has been lost or become meaningless in the vagaries of modem reason. By revealing the truth and healing the self, authorship in The Master and Margarita becomes an especially privileged and broad concept, at times as much a model of human personality as a profeSSion or calling of the literati. In his book Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the human experience of the tradition of art as an opportunity both to gain knowledge ofthe selfand to gather oneselfinto an integral whole by means of the artwork's aesthetic structuring. Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding. Selfunderstanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other. Since we meet the artwork in the world and encounter a world in the individual artwork, the work of art is not some alien universe into which we are magically transported for a time. Rather, we learn to understand ourselves in and through it, and this means that we sublate (aujheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated experiences in the continuity of our own existence ... The binding quality ofthe experience (Erfahrung) ofart must not be disintegrated by aesthetic consciousness. This negative insight, positively expressed, is that art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge. In the broadest sense possible, authorship in The Master and Margarita means sharing in a knowledge of the past that restores wholeness to the self and bestows meaning on the present. This complex process is, for Bulgakov, a search for truth. THE SELF AS AUTHOR AND...