The Master and Margarita as Bulgakov’s Commentary on Soviet Life

My previous post introduced scholarship on The Master and Margarita. I noted that critical attention focused on three themes: the novel as personal commentary, the novel as a continuation of non-Soviet literary influences, and the novel as an examination of the human condition. This post presents the first theme in the list: the novel as…

Scholarly Interest in The Master and Margarita: Overview

Twenty-six years after Bulgakov’s death, the literary journal Moskva (known for publishing writers suppressed during the Stalinist era) published The Master and Margarita in two installments, the first in November 1966 and the second in January 1967.[1] “‘[U]nlike’” anything published during the four previous decades of Soviet Literature, and “unlike” any contemporary literature as well,…

Introduction: Born from Regression

The catalyst for Bulgakov’s investigation into Christianity, and his desire to write about Christ and the devil, appears to be a May 1926 incident during which the Soviet secret police known as the OGPU (Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye or Joint State Police Directorate) searched his apartment and confiscated three notebooks of journals and his manuscript…

Overview

On 24 August 1929, Soviet playwright and author Mikhail Afansievich Bulgakov (1891-1940), who wanted nothing more than success as an artist, wrote his brother that his “destruction as a writer had been accomplished [moe pisatel’skoe unichtozhenie]” [1]. Only three years before, after initial Soviet censorship clamped down on his work, Bulgakov began researching Christianity and…

 The most that the critic newly approaching the novel can hope to achieve is to add constructively to the confusion. – W.J. Leatherbarrow