The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mikhail Bulgakov · Мастер и Маргарита · a novel in two parts and an epilogue · written 1928 to 1940, published 1966 to 1967, in full 1973 · scored on Bulgakov’s Russian, read from knowledge, with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation (1997) beside it for sense; no text in hand, and Russian quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Satirical and fantastic novel with a novel inside it; Soviet satire, Gospel apocrypha and love story in one book
Mythos
Faust inverted, with a devil who does justice and a woman who makes the bargain for love; the Passion retold without miracle as a governor’s failure; the witches’ sabbath and the Walpurgis ball
Phase
One spring week in Moscow and one day in Yershalaim, the fourteenth of Nisan, joined at the end, with an epilogue years later on the night of the spring full moon
Presentation
Fiction; two parts and an epilogue in thirty-two chapters, under an epigraph from Goethe’s Faust; four chapters carry the novel about Pilate, told by Woland, dreamed by Ivan and read by Margarita
Register
From the gossiping patter of the Moscow chapters, a feuilletonist’s, to the sculpted, almost liturgical prose of the chapters in Yershalaim
Scale
A city under fear, a city under Rome nineteen centuries before it, and the two lovers who join them
Governing Proposition
Satan comes to Moscow one spring with his retinue and exposes the cowardice and greed of a literary and official world; a writer whose novel about Pontius Pilate was savaged by the critics has been broken by it, and the woman who loves him makes a bargain with the devil to have him and his book back; and the novel about Pilate, the governor who saw that a wandering philosopher was innocent and sent him to his death, is told inside the book in four chapters until its author sets Pilate free. The wager of the novel is that cowardice is the vice on which a regime of fear runs, and that a satire, a Passion and a love story made into one book can show what truth, art and mercy cost in such a world.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Никогда не разговаривайте с неизвестными”
“Never Talk with Strangers”. The first chapter carries its warning in its title, and the two men in it do not heed it. At Patriarch’s Ponds Berlioz, the chairman of the writers’ association MASSOLIT, and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny, two atheists, are joined by a stranger who tells them that Annushka has already spilled the oil. Before long Berlioz is dead, under a tram, on the oil Annushka spilled. The stranger is Woland, and with his retinue, Koroviev, called Fagot, the cat Behemoth, Azazello and Hella, he has come to Moscow for a week in spring.
Over the whole stands an epigraph from Goethe’s Faust: Mephistopheles’ answer that he is part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good. The book is built in two parts and an epilogue, thirty-two chapters, eighteen in the first part and fourteen in the second. The hero of the title waits: the Master does not appear until the thirteenth chapter. The opening chapters belong to Moscow and the devil, and to a second story that has begun inside the first.
Bulgakov wrote the novel from 1928 until his death in March 1940. He burned a first version in 1930, wrote the book again, and was still revising it, dictating to his wife Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, in the last weeks of his life. It appeared in the Moscow journal Moskva in two instalments, in November 1966 and January 1967, with cuts, and in full in book form in the Soviet Union in 1973. Bulgakov left no fully finished fair copy, and editions differ in detail; the novel is read here in its full form, as one work.
Movement II
The second chapter leaves Moscow for Yershalaim. Woland, who says he was there, tells the two writers how, on the fourteenth of Nisan, the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, in a white cloak with a blood-red lining, came out onto the colonnade of Herod’s palace. He has a headache, and he hates the smell of rose oil. Before him stands a wandering philosopher, Yeshua Ha-Notsri. A swallow flies in under the colonnade and out again while the procurator decides.
Pilate sees that the man is innocent. And he sends him to death to keep his place. Yeshua is no miracle worker here. He has one disciple, Levi Matvei, who writes down what he says and gets it wrong. Among the sayings reported back to Pilate is one he cannot forget, that cowardice is among the worst of vices. The procurator will serve that sentence for two thousand years. The Gospel has been stripped of its miracles, and it keeps its weight for the plainness.
The story of Pilate is told in four chapters, and by three witnesses. Woland tells the second. Ivan, in the clinic, dreams the sixteenth. Margarita reads the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth from a manuscript returned to her. Between them they carry the trial, the execution on Bald Mountain under the storm, the darkness over Yershalaim, the killing of Judas and the burial, and the three tell one story in one voice, grave, exact and almost liturgical, unlike anything in the Moscow chapters around them. It is the Master’s novel, and the form says that its truth does not belong to the man who wrote it and could not be destroyed with his pages.
Movement III
In Moscow Woland gives a séance at the Variety, and the exposures begin. Styopa is flung to Yalta. The house manager Nikanor Bosoy dreams of the currency theatre. Berlioz’s uncle comes up from Kiev. The buffet manager Sokov is told by Woland that there is no such thing as sturgeon of the second freshness: freshness comes in one degree only, the first, which is also the last. Griboedov’s, the writers’ restaurant, burns.
Each episode is a sketch, told by a feuilletonist’s narrator, gossiping and digressive, with comic timing as exact as Gogol’s. Each exposes one more instance of the vice the Pilate chapters judge: the informer who wants a flat, the official who lies about his currency, the man who will say anything to keep his post. Several could go without the book losing a fact it needs, and the joins between them show a text its author did not live to finish. The cumulation is the argument. The officials of the theatre and the housing disappear one by one.
Ivan, who chased the strangers through Moscow, ends in Stravinsky’s clinic. There, in the thirteenth chapter, he meets the Master. The Master has written a novel about Pontius Pilate. The critics savaged it on order, Aloisy Mogarych denounced him because he wanted his rooms, and he broke down and burned the book. He tells Ivan of the woman who loved him, who carried yellow flowers.
Movement IV
The second part opens with Margarita. She has lost the Master and does not know where he is. She makes a bargain with Azazello: she will become a witch for a night and go to Satan’s Great Ball, for the sake of her lover. The Gretchen of the old story has become the one who makes the bargain with the devil, and she makes it for love, not for knowledge. She flies over Moscow as a witch and wrecks the flat of the critic Latunsky.
At the Great Ball the damned pass before her in procession, and among them is Frieda. When the night is over and Woland grants Margarita one wish, she spends it on Frieda, out of pity, and not on herself. Mercy might have cost her the thing she came for; the devil, who does justice, restores the Master to her as well.
The Master burned his novel. Woland returns it whole. “Рукописи не горят”
“Manuscripts don’t burn”. Margarita reads from the restored pages the end of his story: in the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters Pilate arranges, through Afranius, that Judas be killed in a garden at night, and the story closes with the burial and with Levi Matvei. The novel that was destroyed is read again, by the woman who would not let it go.
Movement V
Levi Matvei comes to Woland with a message from Yeshua about the Master. “Он не заслужил света, он заслужил покой”
“He did not deserve light, he deserved peace”. The book never explains the sentence. A writer who wrote the truth and then burned it is given rest, not light, and the instruction comes to the devil from the man the procurator sent to the cross. How Woland and Yeshua divide the world the book leaves half drawn, and that is the question it hands its readers most plainly.
Then the last flight. The riders leave Moscow, and as they ride they shed their Moscow shapes: Koroviev becomes a dark knight. On a stone plateau under the moon sits Pilate, with his dog, who has waited there two thousand years. The Master, the author of Pilate, sets him free, and Pilate is released down the path of moonlight. The novel within the novel has become the plot of the novel, and the writer’s last act is mercy to the character he made.
The epilogue returns to Moscow years after. Ivan is a historian now, and the epilogue finds him on the night of the spring full moon. The moon and the storm have crossed between the two cities from the start, and the epilogue explains more of the week than it needs to. What it cannot explain is the night it keeps returning to, on which a coward was released and two lovers given peace, and a manuscript burned and survived.
Act III · The Twelve
The three strands require one another. Remove Yershalaim and the Moscow satire has no measure of what its cowardice costs; remove Moscow and Pilate’s sin has no present; remove the lovers and nothing joins them, since it is the Master’s novel that is the Jerusalem strand and his release of Pilate that closes it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the episodic middle of the Moscow satire: Styopa flung to Yalta, the house manager Nikanor Bosoy’s dream of the currency theatre, Berlioz’s uncle from Kiev, the buffet manager Sokov, the fire at Griboedov’s. Each is good, and each exposes one more instance of the cowardice and greed the Jerusalem strand judges, so that the cumulation is part of the argument; but several could go without the work losing a fact it needs, and the unrevised state of the text shows in loose joins between them. A spine that is necessary, with limbs in part assembled.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: cowardice is the vice on which a regime of fear runs, and it is the ordinary person’s, not the tyrant’s. Pilate sees that the wandering philosopher is innocent and sends him to death to keep his place; Yeshua’s saying, reported back to him, that cowardice is among the worst of vices becomes the sentence Pilate serves for two thousand years. In Moscow the same vice is shown at every scale: the informer who wants a flat, the officials who lie about their currency, the critics who destroy a book on order. Beside it the novel discloses what art is in such a world, “Рукописи не горят”, manuscripts don’t burn, and what mercy costs, in Margarita’s one wish spent on Frieda. Held below the top because the Moscow disclosures are satire’s, sharper than they are deep, and the state’s violence is shown by absence more than by act.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is reached often, and in every key. The dreadful: the execution on Bald Mountain under the storm, the darkness that covers Yershalaim, Judas killed in a garden at night. The grand: Pilate in his white cloak with the blood-red lining on the colonnade of Herod’s palace, the trial with its headache and its swallow. The wild: Margarita’s flight over Moscow and the wrecking of the critic Latunsky’s flat, and the Great Ball with its procession of the damned. The highest is the last flight, where the riders shed their Moscow shapes, Koroviev becoming a dark knight, and Pilate on his stone plateau with his dog under the moon is released down the path of light. The heights come oftener than in most tragic novels. Held off the very top only because the comic register of the Moscow chapters lowers the ceiling for long stretches.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built twice over. The Passion is retold as an apocryphal Gospel in which the archetype is stripped and kept: Yeshua is no miracle worker, has one disciple who misrecords him, and goes to death by a governor’s weakness, and the story has the weight of the Gospel for that plainness. Faust is the frame of the whole, announced by the epigraph and inverted: Woland is Mephistopheles as an agent of justice, the Gretchen figure becomes the one who makes the bargain, and she makes it for love, not for knowledge. The witches’ sabbath and the Walpurgis ball are built into the plot, not hung on it. The particular stays particular: a cat taking a tram, sturgeon of the second freshness, a woman with yellow flowers. Held a step below the top by the Moscow figures, who are types of satire more than of myth.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is Gogol’s comic fantastic and Hoffmann’s, Goethe’s Faust, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and the Menippean tradition. The turn: a Soviet satire, a Gospel apocrypha and a love story made into one novel, in which Satan comes to Moscow and is the only just power in it, and the fantastic and the metaphysical, abolished by the official aesthetic, return at full scale. The stake is as high as a novel’s can be. Bulgakov wrote it in Stalin’s Moscow, after his plays were banned, with no hope of publication and the knowledge that the manuscript itself could be a charge against him; he burned the first version and wrote it again, and was still revising it in the last weeks of his life. The book took every risk its form allowed, and its author took the larger one of writing it at all. Held below the top only because its materials are openly inherited; the swerve is in their joining.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The novel about Pilate reaches the reader through three witnesses, Woland, who was there, Ivan’s dream, and the Master’s restored pages, and the three tell one story in one voice, so the form itself argues that the truth is not the property of the one who writes it and cannot be burned. The two times are joined at the end, when the Master, the author of Pilate, sets him free: the novel within the novel becomes the plot of the novel, and the writer’s mercy is his last act. The contrast of styles, the chapters in Yershalaim grave and exact, the Moscow chapters a comic narrator’s patter, is the contrast of the two worlds’ relation to truth. Held off the top by the episodic Moscow middle, where the form is a sequence of numbers on a variety bill rather than the instrument of the knowledge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: sixty years of reading since publication, in Russia and in translation, without exhaustion. The questions stay open in the text: why Woland takes his instruction from Yeshua through Levi; what is the peace the Master is given, and why not light; whether the novel’s theology is Christian, Gnostic or neither; whether Woland is a portrait of power, of Stalin’s, or its opposite. The political, the theological, the autobiographical, Margarita read beside Elena Sergeevna, and the textual readings each keep yielding, and the history of the text itself, a work left in revision, is a field of study. The depth is formal as well: the echoes between the two cities, the storm over both, the full moon, the severed head, the gold coin, are left for the reader to find.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Russian literature of its decade, and the book entered it in 1966 and 1967 though it was made in the 1930s; delayed influence is credited and discounted. The force: a reorganisation of what the Russian novel could do after socialist realism, restoring the fantastic, the metaphysical, the comic devil and the religious subject to a literature that had been forbidden them, and showing that satire, scripture and romance could be one form. Discounted for the delay: the field of the 1930s never felt it, and its reach in the West has been as a classic more than as a model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Russia it became one of the most loved novels of the century, its phrases proverbs, and later Russian fiction of the fantastic and the grotesque runs through it; abroad it entered the international novel.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed over sixty years of publication, fifty-three of the full text, at the widest presence. Form: the text survived its author’s lifetime unpublished, a burned first version, the censor’s cuts and the cut serial; the work’s form is whole and legible, and the variants between editions of an unfinished revision are the smallest charge. Presence: as wide as any Russian novel of the century, continuously in print in Russia since 1973 and translated into most written languages, in several English versions; taught, staged and filmed. Fabric: its Soviet surface, the housing committees and the currency raids, is its matter and not a dependence, and the book is read more for what pressed on them now than in 1966. The figure stands at the top of what sixty years can show; it does not stand with the centuries.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the novel in Bulgakov’s Russian, as far as close translation and the Russian known with certainty reach it; the music of the Russian sentence lies beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The command is of two styles held in one book. The chapters in Yershalaim are written in a sculpted, rhythmic, almost liturgical prose, with refrains, the fourteenth of Nisan, the rose oil Pilate hates, the white cloak with the blood-red lining, placed like columns. The Moscow chapters use a feuilletonist’s narrator, gossiping and digressive, with comic timing as exact as Gogol’s: Woland lectures the buffet manager that freshness comes in one degree only, the first, which is also the last. The set pieces, the séance, the Ball, the flight, are built at scale. Charged: the text is unrevised in places, with loose joins and repetitions in the Moscow chapters, and the epilogue explains more than it needs to.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the crucifixion at Bald Mountain, and Behemoth with a primus stove in a currency store. One law governs both: Woland’s justice, which exposes the lie and punishes the coward and cannot itself give light, works by the same rule in the farce and in the Passion, and the full moon and the storm cross from one city to the other. The range is as wide as any novel’s, and it is held. What costs the axis is the metaphysics at the top of that law: how Woland and Yeshua divide the world is left underdetermined, and the unfinished state of the work shows in small contradictions of time and detail in the Moscow chapters. A wide cosmos held under one physics, with its first principle left half drawn.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Pilate’s headache and conscience, Ivan’s breakdown and remaking, the Master’s fear. Love: the two lovers, and Margarita’s courage. The state: denunciation, arrest by implication, the disappearances, the housing that men inform for. Literature as an institution: MASSOLIT, the critics, the writers’ restaurant at Griboedov’s. History: Roman Judea and Soviet Moscow, nineteen centuries apart, set in one frame. The sacred: the Passion, damnation, forgiveness. Madness and its clinic, money and its exposures, the natural order in the storm and the moon. All of it passes through a week in one city and a day in another, and the two are made to answer each other. Held a step down because the state is an implied agent more than a shown one, and the domestic order is thin outside the lovers.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, then The Swerve at 9.0, level with The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable. The Passion retold without miracle as a governor’s failure, and Faust inverted into a devil who does justice and a woman who bargains for love, both carrying the plot; and a Soviet satire, a Gospel apocrypha and a love story joined in one novel, written in Stalin’s Moscow with no hope of print and at the risk of the manuscript itself.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0, held by the episodic Moscow middle: Styopa’s flight to Yalta, Nikanor Bosoy’s dream, Berlioz’s uncle, the buffet manager and the fire at Griboedov’s, several of which could go without the book losing a fact it needs. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.4: one law of justice held across the farce and the Passion, with its first principle, how Woland and Yeshua divide the world, left half drawn.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by one tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Мастер и Маргарита, scored as one novel in its full form: two parts and an epilogue, thirty-two chapters, under its epigraph from Goethe’s Faust. Bulgakov wrote it from 1928 to his death in March 1940, burned a first version in 1930, and revised the work to the last weeks of his life, dictating to Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova. It was first published in the Moscow journal Moskva, in two instalments, November 1966 and January 1967, with cuts, and in full in book form in the Soviet Union in 1973. The cut serial is not scored. Bulgakov left no fully finished fair copy, and editions differ in detail; those variants are not scored as different works. Every axis is judged on the novel in Bulgakov’s Russian, which was not in hand; Russian is quoted only where its words are certain, in the title of the first chapter and in two sentences, and the epigraph is paraphrased. Translation · Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s (Penguin, 1997), read beside the Russian for sense, chosen because it keeps close to the Russian in syntax and register; Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor’s (Ardis, 1995) is known for its annotation, and Michael Glenny’s (1967) for its English. No translation was in hand, and none is charged to the novel; the English set beneath each Russian quotation gives its sense in plain words, close to Pevear and Volokhonsky’s, and was not checked against their text. Events are paraphrased. The music of Bulgakov’s Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the first full edition abroad, the editors who have since re-established the text, the length of the book, the films and series made from it, and the later novels said to draw on it, are not given. Citations are by chapter.