The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 179

was well versed in religious controversies and texts. He also deeply loved Leo Tolstoy. In the 1880s and 1890s, in pursuit of a faith that was compatible with reason, Tolstoy had produced his own version of the Gospels, deleting all the supernatural prompts. Bulgakov eliminates the same miraculous layers and legends from the Master’s novel. The truth does not need them.

Bulgakov’s Satan figure, Woland, thus emerges as a fascinating bridge figure between our two great nineteenth-century philosopher-novelists. As we saw in the preceding chapter, which introduced Woland conversing with Berlioz’s severed head at Satan’s Ball, this devil is firmly in the Dostoevsky line of “multiple valid truths.” Individuals (in this case, the Moscow public) are allowed to live – and die – by their own professed beliefs. To be sure, most of these beliefs are shoddy, and Woland’s devilish Gogolian retinue forces their hypocrisy to the surface. A more profound debt is owed to that clownish devil who turns up in The Brothers Karamazov, hallucinated by the middle brother, Ivan. Ivan’s devil defends his existence on earth as a guarantee that there would continue to be events, absurdities, human suffering, for “otherwise everything would turn into an endless prayer service,” tedious and undifferentiated.18 Woland defends himself with the same argument, when challenged at the end of the novel by his detractors from the Christian side. “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist,” he retorts to Matthew the Levite, “and what would the world look like if all the shadows disappeared?” (ch. 24, p. 305).

For all his debts to Dostoevsky and Gogol, however, Bulgakov’s Satan also realizes an authorial fantasy very precious to Tolstoy: the ethically ideal relation between an author and a reader. Except when he is the mouthpiece for an installment of Christ’s Passion, Woland is a taciturn man. This is appropriate. He shows rather than tells. Woland might have originated in Ivan Karamazov’s devil. But in Bulgakov he is sobered up, transformed from a chattering buffoon into a seer, and serves both the Gogol–Dostoevsky and the Tolstoy line.

City myths: Petersburg, Moscow, OneState

What is the Petersburg Myth, and how does Bely’s novel named after that city contribute to it? This question was formalized as a research area in the mid-1980s, when Yury Lotman and his fellow semioticians turned their attention to the “Petersburg text” as exemplary of the cultural symbolism of cities.19 With Russian space in mind, they drew up several robust distinctions. First, the city as a demarcated site could stand in one of two relationships to the undeveloped territory surrounding it. Either it could spread out to absorb and