Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)
My blog essays neither seek nor merit a large readership, but I think I have discovered how I might get one should I be so inclined. All I would have to do is write exclusively about Princeton athletic events or the weddings of attractive and popular young people with many friends. So profuse has been the clientele for the account of Sophia’s wedding last week that I think I must retreat to the obscurity of some arcane topic and treat it arcanely. I seek, in Stendahl’s somewhat cryptic note at the end of the Charterthouse of Parma, “the happy few”. But even the fewest may not be so happy after learning that my topic will be a novel of Mikhail Bulgakov’s set in 1930s Moscow, The Master and Margarita. Only sort of about that, of course.
This very strange and funny novel was written in the earlier period of Stalin’s tyranny, mainly in the Thirties. It includes at least two plots, though their summary description will tell you very little about the book’s genius. One strand (set in contemporary Moscow) is a satirical treatment of an official Communist Party writers’ guild, Massolit, and its strange visitation by the Devil in the persona of a mysterious foreign professor, Voland. Voland brings with him an entourage and an ambiance of the weird and the supernatural. A second plot (set in ancient Jerusalem) is an historical novel written by a disillusioned writer called “the Master,” about Pontius Pilate, Jesus, and Judas Iscariot. In both there is a lot of interplay with biblical and secular literature. Margarita, the Master’s girl-friend, appears to be a Marxist reflection of Goethe’s “eternal feminine” in Faust. Around the early Thirties militant atheism went into overdrive as Party doctrine and practice. While wrecking crews demolished old churches, stern-eyed poets wrote odes celebrating the death of God. Berlioz, the Massolit commissar, denies that Jesus ever even existed. But Professor Voland’s amazing powers seem to prove that supernatural evil, at least, is real enough; and the Master’s novel treats Jesus as an unquestionably historical personage, if only a deluded madman.
I read The Master and Margarita in 1976 in London at the urging of a friend and colleague at the William Morris Centre, Tom Drescher. I thought it was absolutely engaging and rather amazing, but I certainly didn’t “understand” it. Nor did I then know enough to appreciate its relationship to a long and paradoxical tradition in modern European thought that has at long last captured my curious attention: the cultural significance of “the historical Jesus.” Judaism, and its late Antique sect that eventually became Christianity as a distinct faith, are described as revealed religions. The revelation is contained in a book, or rather in an anthology of books, the Bible. For Christians the revelation is found both in the ancient books first written in Hebrew and in the later ones, first written by early followers of Jesus and recorded in the common Greek language of international exchange of their day. Of the latter, four (the gospels) are biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, presenting a common narrative with much overlapping and some contradictory detail. All four gospels present Jesus as a miracle-worker during his life, and report his rising from death after his execution. The books of the Bible are surely the most studied books in the history of world literature and the objects of a vast secondary literature.
A miracle is an unusual event for which there is no rational or scientific explanation, and in the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment, thoughtful people were less and less willing to credit them—including those in the Bible, indeed including those attributed to Jesus. Contrary to popular belief, it was not an irreligious age. But the philosophical minds that were awestruck by the brilliance, order, and rationality of God’s Creation could scarcely credit that the Creator would on odd occasions break his own rules to stop the sun in its invariable course so that Gideon could slay more Amorites, or that his Son could induce the mass suicide of a herd of Gadarene swine. The Scottish philosopher Hume included a devastating critique of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). But growing doubts about New Testament miracles only stimulated greater interest in Jesus as an historical moral philosopher and religious teacher. There emerged a new kind of biography of the “historical Jesus.”
Its literary history is too rich to deal with comprehensively here. Our own great Enlightenment President, Thomas Jefferson, created his own version of the New Testament by excising from the Authorized Version those parts he considered accretions, leaving, he hoped, a clearer and more coherent body of Jesus’s ethical teachings. The rapid growth of scientific investigations in the nineteenth century had its parallels in professional biblical and theological studies. Two of these were particularly important. In 1835 David Strauss, a liberal German Lutheran theologian, published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, in which he denied Jesus’s divinity and chucked out his supernatural deeds. Mary Ann Evans (“George Eliot”) translated this scandalous book into English. Far more important in its popular impact was the French Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan (1863). I have written about this gentle, beautiful, and reverent book before. Renan was a one-time Roman Catholic seminarian, who early abandoned his peasant faith. He became a deeply learned historian, medievalist, and patrologist concentrating on the origins of Christianity. His biography of Jesus is wholly demythologizing, but not adversarial or polemical. It was intended for, and connected with, a very large audience of intelligent readers.
It caused outrage among church leaders. The Pope declared Renan “the arch-blasphemer of Europe”. But many educated Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, actually found spiritual nourishment in the work, which freed them to strengthen their core beliefs by jettisoning dogmatic stumbling blocks. This is in some ways an astonishing conclusion to come to with regard to one of the most heretical books ever published, but it is clearly demonstrated in the work of an English historian, Robert Priest.* Priest has made a thorough study of the original Renan archives, which contain many letters written to him (some anonymously) from grateful Christian readers who found in his book a strengthening of their own religious ideas.
I was led to Priest’s work while trying to figure out how a great Portuguese novelist of the 1890s would write two fictional versions of the death of Christ, and place one of them unexpectedly into the middle of a slightly ribald social satire. Or why a great spate of historical fiction about Jesus, Judas, Pontius Pilate, and other related characters suddenly appears on the scene in the later 1800s. I have by no means figured it all out, but Bulgakov’s very bizarre Master and Margarita has certainly set me to thinking. The Bolshevik intellectuals, and their satirical reflections in the Moscow writers and theater people of Massolit, were all of course vocal atheists. They did not believe in a God of Providence, but in the scientific determinism (dialectic) of history. In the first, weird chapter of the novel, Mikhail Berlioz, head of Massolit, and Ivan Bezrodny, a poet and the author of a travesty on the birth of Christ, are discussing the non-existence of Jesus. The Devil, who appears to them in the persona of Professor Woland, a foreign, apparently German historian, overhears and joins their conversation. Their first fear is that this unknown personage is a police spy—generally a sound default assumption in Stalin’s capital—but what Woland has to say is so bizarre as to reassure them that he is only a madman. His prediction is that Berlioz will very soon meet his death by decapitation by a female member of the Komsomol (a Communist Girl Scout). Their conversation wanders into various byways, but at its end Woland directly contradicts the views of the literary men concerning Jesus.
“Jesus did exist, you know.”
“Look, Professor,” said Berlioz with a forced smile.
“With all respect to you as a scholar we take a different attitude on that point.”
“It’s not a question of having an attitude,” replied the strange professor. “He existed, that’s all there is to it.”
Thus did the diabolical historian insist upon the historicity of the historical Jesus by way of introducing into the mystifying early pages of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita the opening chapter of a second book, a modern apocryphal gospel, the Master’s condemned historical novel, a chapter set at the palace of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem in the time of--Jesus. In a brilliant introductory essay in the Everyman’s Library edition, Cambridge professor Simon Franklin writes of Bulgakov’s own temporarily doomed text: “Not a page was publishable…[with its] multiplicity of styles, with the logic of fantasy installed as fact; a ‘true’ figure of Christ who stands outside the doctrines both of orthodox Soviet atheism and of Orthodox Russian Christianity.”
But history does have its dialectics, often strange ones. You can now find photographs in the newspapers of Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB officer) snuggling with Patriarch Kyril of the Russian state church, or of Kyril’s priests asperging Putin’s bombs and bombers on their way to Ukraine.
*Robert D. Priest, “Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France: The Popular Reception of Renan’s Life of Jesus,” The Journal of Modern History, 86 (2014): 258-284.
Warning: this is post number 666 in the continuing series.
