The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 177

the installments are respectively related orally by the Devil, dreamt by a Muscovite poet, and read silently by Margarita as part of the Master’s novel – all narrators are identical in their sobriety, authority, majestic high-Realist secular style, and compassionate psychological detail with no trace of miracle. The Jerusalem chapters are clearly all the same book – the Master’s novel – regardless of who delivers it, or when, or how. Such a confluence of realistic diction in all segments of this inserted drama, whether uttered, dreamt, or read silently to oneself, lends an aura of pre-verbal authenticity to Christ’s Passion. It also suggests a conviction dear to the Symbolist era: that the true artist has an intuitive perception of Truth, superseding eyewitness accounts left us in the Gospels. The realness of such a vision is not dependent on any local narrative conventions or approximations.

Thus we might say that the boldest “estrangement from reality” in The Master and Margarita is not the magic – that is, not the fact that black cats can walk upright and talk, that Margarita becomes a witch and flies around on a broomstick, that Woland dispatches a drunken theatre bureaucrat to Yalta in five seconds, or that Muscovites turn up in the marsh of a Siberian river with dancing mermaids at full moon. Such character types and episodes are completely routine and rule-abiding within the conventions of the genre from which they come: a Ukrainian folk tale as Gogol might write it up, or a Faust drama. The jolt comes when the reader realizes that the “illusion of reality” in those supremely realistic Jerusalem chapters has not been designed to “feel or look real” according to the usual fictional contract, where readers suspend their disbelief in order to enter into the fictive world. Those chapters simply are real. Or rather, they are as close as a work of verbal art can come to that condition, construed as a window on to an unconstructed prior fact. The names of people and places in the Jerusalem chapters are not the familiar canonized names of the Gospel accounts but what people and places were called back then, in their own time. They are not aware of their own symbolic significance. These scenes do not know that they are being read.

At one point the Master, terrified he will be arrested for the crime of writing about Jesus in an atheist state, burns his novel. Woland hands the book back to its author intact with the comment that “manuscripts don’t burn.” But why a manuscript doesn’t burn is of key importance. It is not only because the Prince of Darkness is there to retrieve it from the flames, his natural element and thus under his control, and not only because the artistic Word is immortal. Bulgakov suggests something more radical. The Master has not so much created as re-created reality, preserving truth and then releasing it through his novel. For this reason, even he cannot get rid of the document, which is a portal.