The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

176 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

modesty and reduced expectation rather than in Scythian rebellion or excess, and one that does end, perhaps even triumphantly, on a point of rest. The plot weaves together three familiar stories, albeit with unfamiliar, altered names. The first is the visit of the Devil (here called Woland, professor of black magic) to a major city (here Moscow) during a springtime full moon, to find a hostess for his annual ball. The second is the Faustian contract between this devil and a bereaved person (here Margarita), who bargains her soul in hopes of locating her disappeared beloved (the Master, a novelist out of favor with Stalinist literary bureaucrats). The third is the crucifixion of Christ (here called Yeshua) in Jerusalem (here Yershalaim), told as a detective story – in places a secret-police story – scattered in four installments throughout the Moscow narrative. The two cities are frequently superimposed on one another, Moscow’s towers and turrets signaling the city’s status as the “New Jerusalem,” with violent events in one prefiguring similar violence in the other.

Such double-tiered, “palimpsest” narration need not in itself be disorienting. What startles the reader is Bulgakov’s chronotopic play, that is, the fact that miracles, madness and magic do not occur in the environments where we would most expect them. The Moscow chapters are crammed with supernatural happenings, devils (sublime and petty), vampires, witches, hallucinations, carnival trickery, and yet are set in a familiar city full of recognizable streets, buildings, Soviet-style communal apartments, famous landmarks, as well as real people and events out of the Stalinist 1930s. This invasion of the comic-diabolical into everyday activities – professional meetings, tram rides, visits to the theatre or grocery store – recalls much more the texture of Gogol than of Dostoevsky, who doesn’t really have an “everyday.” Bulgakov’s use of this device in the Moscow chapters functions in part as political allegory. As the Terror gained momentum after 1936, innocent people were disappearing as if by witchcraft, their apartments sealed and their names effaced from public record.

If Moscow is the humdrum demonic, what of the Jerusalem chapters? They constitute a genuine historical novel – perhaps even a “novelized history.” Bulgakov was a meticulous researcher, and in the early drafts of his novel he footnoted sources for the scenes describing Yeshua’s arrest, Pontius Pilate’s migraine and political cowardice, the machinations of the High Priests, the anguish of Judas, and the stations of the Cross from the perspective of a tormented disciple. Of course, in the official judgment of atheistic Moscow in the 1930s, these New Testament chapters would have to be declared a “fiction.” Inside the chapters, however, we would expect to find some evidence, intona-tional or visual, of the miracles that animated the disciples and sustained their faith. This is not the case. Regardless of who relates the crucifixion – and