The Devil's Overpraised Carnival: Why THE MASTER AND MARGARITA Does Not Quite Earn Its Halo

There are books whose fame resembles a fine patina: time deepens the color, clarifies the grain, and makes the object beneath it more beautiful. There are others upon which fame settles like theatrical gilt, thickening year by year until one hesitates to tap the surface for fear of discovering plaster. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita belongs, I suspect, rather more to the second category.

This is not to say that it is a bad novel. A bad novel is an easy corpse to dissect, and The Master and Margarita is irritating precisely because it is so extravagantly alive in parts. It possesses marvelous scenes, memorable inventions, a genuine aura of danger, and--most importantly--the strange, lucid, sun-struck chapters concerning Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Those passages contain a different and, to my taste, much greater novel struggling to escape from the noisy carnival surrounding it.

The difficulty is that Bulgakov's book begins by making promises its subsequent performance only intermittently keeps.

The opening at Patriarch's Ponds is superb. Two complacent Soviet literary men encounter an elegant foreigner who knows altogether too much about metaphysics, breakfast, and impending death. The scene has the compact menace of a nightmare that has put on an expensive summer suit. Its details are crisp; its comedy carries an undercurrent of doom; the intrusion of Woland into the atheistic certainty of Moscow is at once ridiculous and genuinely uncanny. Berlioz's fate, foretold with conversational politeness and fulfilled with grotesque exactitude, suggests that the novel will become a metaphysical satire of formidable precision.

One expects a blade.

Too often one gets fireworks.

Once Woland's entourage begins its prolonged occupation of Moscow, Bulgakov repeatedly substitutes comic escalation for artistic development. Koroviev-Fagott, Behemoth, Azazello and their infernal companions are amusing creations, but amusement is a perishable substance. The first impossible prank gleams; the fifth capers; the fifteenth begins to rattle its bells. People disappear, apartments change hands, clothes vanish, money becomes worthless, bureaucrats are humiliated, respectable citizens expose their greed, and Soviet officialdom proves unequal to supernatural mischief. The machinery is ingenious, but we soon understand the mechanism.

A pompous fool encounters Woland's agents.

The fool behaves foolishly.

Reality bends.

The fool is punished.

Another fool enters.

There is, of course, pleasure in repetition, especially in satire. Gogol could repeat a comic pattern until repetition itself became metaphysical. But Gogol's absurdities tend to deepen into terror or pity; behind the swollen nose of comedy one senses the skull. Bulgakov's Moscow episodes too frequently remain sketches--brilliant sketches, perhaps, but sketches nevertheless. They expose cowardice, careerism, greed, hypocrisy and bureaucratic stupidity, yet their targets are often so conveniently contemptible that satire has almost nothing resistant to bite into.

It is difficult to admire the moral courage of shooting fish in an enchanted barrel.

This is one reason the novel's enormous reputation has always puzzled me. Its defenders often speak of its daring mixture of satire, fantasy, romance, theology, political allegory and philosophical fiction, as though multiplicity were itself evidence of greatness. But a cabinet filled with curious objects is not necessarily a masterpiece of arrangement. Bulgakov has devils, witches, writers, bureaucrats, ancient Judea, flying women, talking cats, literary politics, executions, magic shows, madhouses, moonlight, manuscripts and eternal love. The abundance is undeniable. What is less certain is whether these elements ever form an artistic whole as profound as the reputation of the novel implies.

The seams remain visible.

Most conspicuous is the difference between the Jerusalem chapters and nearly everything around them.

When Bulgakov enters the world of Pontius Pilate, his prose seems suddenly to lose weight and gain gravity. The feverish Moscow farce recedes. The light changes. Stone, dust, heat, headache, fear and political calculation acquire an almost tactile clarity. Pilate becomes not a satirical puppet but a human consciousness trapped between private perception and public necessity. His encounter with Yeshua is compelling precisely because Bulgakov does not need a parade of supernatural effects to make it strange.

Here evil is not theatrical.

It is administrative.

Pilate suspects that the harmless, unsettling prisoner before him may possess a truth that official reality cannot accommodate. Yet the procurator is constrained by rank, fear, political calculation and the machinery of empire. His tragedy is not that he cannot distinguish right from wrong. It is that he distinguishes them and still chooses cowardice.

This is vastly more interesting than watching another Moscow careerist lose his trousers.

The Yeshua chapters also possess something the main satire often lacks: ambiguity. Yeshua is neither merely the Christ of orthodox doctrine nor merely a modern rationalist in sandals. He is fragile, impractical, unsettlingly gentle and almost dangerous in his inability to accept conventional hostility as final. Pilate, meanwhile, is neither monster nor martyr. Their encounter generates an ethical pressure that the novel's grotesque Soviet episodes seldom sustain.

Even the execution, though inevitably shadowed by the cultural memory of the Gospel, feels less like theological illustration than historical nightmare. One has the sensation of witnessing a small, miserable event whose significance exceeds the comprehension of nearly everyone present. That disproportion--the apparent triviality of an event beside its immense future consequence--is one of the novel's finest intuitions.

Had Bulgakov written an entire novel of Pilate, Yeshua, Levi Matvei and the moral corrosion of imperial power, I suspect we might possess a quieter and greater book.

Instead we are returned to Behemoth.

The cat is funny. I concede the cat.

But how many times must a cat be funny before one begins to feel that laughter is being used as insulation?

The Master himself presents another problem. A novel bearing his title might be expected to provide him with a consciousness of extraordinary force. Instead he often seems less a fully realized writer than an emblem of the persecuted artist. His suffering is intelligible, his despair sympathetic, his destruction of his manuscript dramatically useful--but the man remains oddly pale beside his legend.

We are told, in effect, that he has created something of tremendous spiritual significance. Fortunately, we are allowed glimpses of that creation in the Pilate chapters, and those glimpses justify a good deal. Yet the Master as a personality is curiously recessive. One remembers his predicament more distinctly than his mind.

Margarita is more vivid, although she too suffers from being converted into a function of the novel's myth. Her devotion to the Master is presented as absolute, liberating and metaphysically ratified. There is beauty in this, especially in her refusal to accept the disappearance of the man she loves as the final word on their story. But Bulgakov's treatment of love sometimes asks us to admire intensity where we might prefer complexity.

Margarita becomes magnificent when she acts--when rage, loyalty and reckless freedom propel her beyond ordinary social existence. Yet the romance itself is peculiarly weightless. We are given an ideal of devotion more than the difficult texture of two minds loving one another. Their love is powerful because the novel declares it incorruptible; it is less powerful as observation of how intimacy actually behaves.

In this respect the celebrated romantic dimension of The Master and Margarita seems to me one of its least convincing triumphs.

Even Woland, magnificent as an entrance, gradually becomes less interesting as his philosophical role becomes clearer. He is not simply Satan, nor simply evil, nor simply justice. He and his retinue administer a strange system of supernatural correction. They expose frauds, humiliate hypocrites, reward certain forms of courage or fidelity, and operate according to rules that seem older and more complicated than conventional morality.

This is clever.

It is also suspiciously tidy.

For a novel praised for metaphysical depth, its moral arrangements can seem surprisingly schematic. Moscow is full of little sinners who require infernal spanking. Margarita's fidelity possesses genuine worth. Pilate's cowardice requires centuries of punishment and eventual release. The Master deserves rest. The devil, though dangerous, performs a function within a larger cosmic balance.

One sees the elegance of the design.

One also sees the design.

Great metaphysical fiction should leave a residue that resists the author's broom. Bulgakov's universe, for all its apparent wildness, can feel curiously well managed.

This is where comparison with Andrei Platonov's Chevengur becomes illuminating--and damaging.

Chevengur is the less immediately charming book. It does not offer Bulgakov's sleek theatricality, his urbane diablerie or his succession of quotable grotesques. Platonov's language is stranger, poorer and richer at once, as if ordinary Russian had been dismantled by peasants and dreamers and put back together according to instructions received in sleep. His characters attempt to build communism not merely as a political system but as an answer to loneliness, death, hunger, time and the unbearable incompleteness of human existence.

The result is comic, horrifying, tender and almost impossible to stabilize.

That instability is precisely its greatness.

In Chevengur, ideology does not merely provide targets for satire. It penetrates consciousness. People sincerely try to inhabit abstractions. Political language enters the body, mutates desire, reorganizes friendship, and produces strange new species of hope and cruelty. Platonov does not stand safely outside his fools and point at them. He understands that foolishness may be inseparable from longing.

Bulgakov's bureaucrats are often ridiculous because they are spiritually small.

Platonov's revolutionaries are ridiculous because human beings are tragically incapable of building heaven without bringing their wounds into it.

That difference is enormous.

Platonov's absurdity therefore has greater artistic depth. One laughs and then discovers that the laughter has become pity; the pity becomes dread; the dread unexpectedly becomes tenderness. His prose seems to know things that its author has not fully domesticated. Bulgakov, by contrast, is frequently too accomplished a showman. He knows exactly when the cat should fire the pistol.

This does not diminish Bulgakov's courage. The circumstances under which The Master and Margarita was written and eventually published have inevitably become part of its aura, and understandably so. A persecuted writer produces a fantastical novel about a persecuted writer whose destroyed manuscript survives: biography and fiction clasp hands so neatly that resistance to the legend becomes difficult.

But historical importance is not identical with artistic perfection.

Nor does censorship automatically improve what has been censored.

The famous idea that manuscripts do not burn has acquired the radiance of an artistic creed, and deservedly so. Yet one may admire that creed without pretending that every surviving page burns with equal intensity.

The oddest experience of rereading The Master and Margarita is therefore one of alternating admiration and impatience. Again and again Bulgakov produces something wonderful: Pilate's headache beneath the merciless sun; Yeshua's disarming speech; the strange sorrow of the moon; Margarita's ecstatic escape; Woland's first appearance; the haunting notion of a cowardice that outlives an empire.

Then comes another infernal practical joke.

Another bureaucrat.

Another comic disappearance.

Another ingenious piece of supernatural slapstick.

One begins to feel like a guest at a magnificent party who has discovered that the host owns only three records.

Perhaps this is why the novel remains so beloved. Its virtues are unusually visible. It offers readers immediately recognizable pleasures: fantasy, satire, romance, theology, rebellion, comedy, mystery, political dissent, talking animals, demonic elegance. It is easy to fall in love with its furniture.

Platonov is harder. Chevengur does not invite admiration so much as infect perception. It gives fewer souvenirs. There is no Woland to dress as for Halloween, no black cat to place on a tote bag. Its artistry works at the level of language and consciousness, where cultural fame has greater difficulty merchandising itself.

Yet if I must choose which novel seems to enlarge the possibilities of fiction, I choose Chevengur.

Bulgakov's book dazzles me.

Platonov's alters the temperature of the room.

This is not a plea to dethrone The Master and Margarita. Literary reputations need not be guillotined simply because they have become swollen. The novel deserves to live; portions of it deserve to live for a very long time. The Pilate and Yeshua narrative in particular contains the severity, strangeness and moral intelligence of a masterpiece.

But the masterpiece is intermittent.

The Master and Margarita begins with the confidence of a great novel, repeatedly becomes one, and repeatedly wanders away from itself to perform another trick.

Its admirers call this abundance.

I call it, sometimes, evasion.

Behind the masks, the broomsticks, the vodka and pickled mushrooms, the variety-show magic, the spectral retinue and the splendidly insolent cat stands a much finer book: a book about cowardice, truth, art, memory and the terrible ease with which human beings betray what they already know to be true.

Whenever Bulgakov allows that book to speak, he is magnificent.

I only wish he had interrupted it less often.