Russian literature. A short introduction

compromise. Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1928–40), for example, juxtaposed to the vision of a corrupt 1920s Moscow, disrupted by Satan, a ‘humanized’ version of Jesus Christ as socially impotent ‘holy fool’, moving through a Jerusalem that has uncanny resemblances to the Moscow of the late 1930s. And the novel’s epilogue allowed the final word to Woland, Bulgakov’s version of Mephisto, who voiced a code of moral relativism in which ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were associated with ‘light’ and ‘dark’ in the physical world, both being seen as necessary in a life without sensual monotony. For their part, the short stories of Daniil Kharms, such as Incidents (1934–6), were brilliant exposures of the dehumanization of life in the 1930s and also texts in which meaningless cruelty itself became a central artistic device, and indeed the object of collusive pleasure for narrator and reader.

In the case of Soviet art, then, it is simply not possible to draw an easy connection between talent and moral steadfastness: many of the most gifted writers had attitudes to tyranny that were equivocal or even admiring. One logical response would be to see nearly everything, including much work produced ‘for the desk drawer’ (neither Bulgakov nor Kharms had any illusions about being able to publish their later writings), as damnable on the grounds of its ethical dubiety, while consigning Master and Margarita to a different circle of hell from, say, Anna Karavaeva’s trilogy The Motherland (1951), which celebrates the joys of life under the wise governance of the all-seeing Stalin. But this would be to imitate in reverse the narrow-minded cultural politics of the Soviet era, according to which only works imbued with ‘Communist morality’ and ‘progressiveness’ deserved to survive (see Chapter 2). It would also conceal the extent to which the moral dilemmas of Soviet artists resembled those of artists at other times and in other socities; as the Russian historian Boris Groys has pointed out, ‘historically, art that is universally regarded as good has frequently served to embellish and glorify power’. If one takes a longer or broader view of the tradition of ‘embellishing and glorifying power’, it is instructive to read Mandelstam’s ‘Ode to Stalin’ in the context of Lomonosov’s tributes