The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

178 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Such a Modernist project, which presumes the existence of other worlds to which poets have privileged access, recalls Bely’s Petersburg. But Bulgakov’s reasons are quite different from Bely’s Faustian search for knowledge in the dual worlds of Symbolism, or Zamyatin’s celebration of the Dionysian impulse in the Mephi beyond the Green Wall. Bely disrupts the “Realist contract” through rhythmic word-symbols. Zamyatin slices visual images along multiple planes to invade and break down familiar worlds. Bulgakov adopts the Tolstoyan strategy of making a story even more truth-bearing if it can be shown to do without words – that is, if it can avoid the indignity of being dependent on one speaker’s limited perspective. Woland introduces this theme in the opening scene.

Mikhail Berlioz, editor, atheist, and head of the Writers’ Union, meets the “strange professor” at Patriarch’s Pond in Moscow. Berlioz and his poet-friend are suspicious of this foreign-looking fellow, especially when the three get into a debate about the historicity of Jesus Christ. Suddenly the professor whispers to them: “Keep in mind that Jesus did exist”:

“You know, Professor,” answered Berlioz with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but we happen to have a different point of view regarding that issue.”

“No points of view are necessary,” replied the strange professor. “He simply existed, that’s all there is to it.”

“But surely some proof is required,” began Berlioz.

“No, no proof is required,” answered the professor.16

At this point the professor’s foreign accent “somehow disappears,” and the first installment of this true story flows out from behind the text. Bulgakov had originally planned his novel as a “Gospel According to the Devil.” This Devil, a sad, thoughtful figure, remains the novel’s wisest, most authoritative source of knowledge, the coordinator of its various planes, and – like Zamyatin’s Mephi – an uneasy ally of the Good. Both sets of events, Woland in Moscow and Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, take place from Wednesday through Saturday night of the vernal full moon (Passover Week). Only in the final minutes of the final night do all levels of the novel unite on the same plane, in a triumphantly ahistorical timelessness. It is a time-space that Tolstoy always dreamed of. Every earthly creature had been in the same doubt, and now they can all be in the same truth. The author does not have to prove or persuade with the illusion of reality. He simply draws back the veil.

Bulgakov’s first biographer suggested that the idea for a “Gospel According to Woland” might even have come to Bulgakov from Tolstoy, who, after his “break” in the 1880s, “rewrote the Gospels to make them more logical and coherent.”17 Bulgakov,the sonofa professor of theologyat theKievan Academy,