Dogma is enemy of truth. To believe reality
cannot be so, when reality is so, is delusion; to call this delusion
rationalism is parodic. In The Master and
Margarita, Bulgakov drops a walking refutation into Moscow, he drops the
devil among atheists. Do they accept, or even consider, what their reason and
senses should tell them? No, they fall back on dogmatic materialism. The
literary establishment will not consider the devil, or God, or magic, or any
speck of the old religion. To contrast this denial of truth, Bulgakov gives a
model of artistic creation of truth, in the Master’s story.
On an ordinary evening in Soviet Russia,
the devil comes to Moscow. Posing as Professor Woland, a scholar of black magic,
Satan and his coterie of demons performs a farce, with Soviet literary world
his stage and the Muscovite upper-crust his unwitting players. Between these
satires, the audience reads the eponymous Master’s unpublished manuscript, a
retelling of Christ’s final days, from Pilate’s perspective.
A rationalist world-view need not cause a
materialist one; that is, a rigorous and conservative evaluation of facts need
not lead us to the conclusion that the supernatural is superstition. In our
world, rationalism implies materialism; but in another world, where magic does
exist, would not denying the supernatural betray rationalism? Bulgakov’s ‘educated’
Muscovites ignore the truth to maintain materialism. They accept absurd
materialist explanations before even considering fantastical truths. Confronted
with the fantastical, characters stick to materialism, against all reason. This
reveals materialism to be an ideology as dogmatic as religious bull-headedness.
The rationalism of the ‘educated’
characters is more rationalisation than rationality. At first, some characters
use Holmesian deduction, whittling away impossibility until only truth remains,
however improbable. When Rimsky and Varenukha hear Styopa, the director of
their theatre, is in Yalta, they don’t believe it. He had called from Moscow so
recently, and Yalta is so far away; he had no time to reach Yalta. (In fact,
Satan teleported him there.) But Rimsky and Varenukha have received his
telegraphed signature, and have heard complaints from Yalta police, suggesting
Styopa is in Yalta.
To his credit, Rimsky does not disregard
this; he considers improbable possibilities that could fit the baffling facts. Maybe
it was not Styopa who called from his apartment? Thus, he may have already been
on his way to Yalta? No, no, that most assuredly was his voice on the phone.
Did he board a fighter plane? Unlikely, yes, but possible. Oh, but Yalta police
say he has no boots on, and what military guard would allow a bootless man on a
plane. Hypnosis? But the Yalta police confirm his presence, and hypnosis cannot
teleport a man.
This is perfectly reasonable trial and
error; no possibility is daft so long as it is possible. But then the men get
lazy. Without evidence, Varenukha declares Styopa is not in Yalta, but a Yalta restaurant in Pushkino. And those Yalta
police confirming his whereabouts, well, that’s just one of Styopa’s tricks. These
half-hearted rationalists do not inquire how Styopa could perform this trick, nor
to what end he would. They have reached a common sensical answer, and that’s
all that matters – the truth be damned.
This parody of rationalism peaks in the
epilogue. Moscow’s lower classes gossip about satanic magic – what else
explains the recent madness? Of course, ‘the more educated and intelligent
people had nothing to do with the tales of the evil one’s visit to the capital’
(390). All this hullabaloo was in fact mass hypnosis. The ‘devil’ and his
coterie were but trouble-making master hypnotists. The man who had his head
removed and reattached to his body? He merely thought he lost his head. That bullet-proof cat the militia fought?
Merely a figment of the men’s imagination. Those Yalta police who were never in
the same room as the hypnotists? Why, that proves the existence of
long-distance hypnosis! As the narrator quips: ‘a fact remains a fact, and will
not be dismissed without some explanation’ (390).
How Muscovites discuss Jesus emphasises
their dogmatic materialism, which masquerades as rationalism. Although an
officially atheist state, Soviet Russia need not completely deny Christ. One
can deny Socrates was divine, yet still accept he existed. In Jesus’ case, that
is not enough for ‘educated’ Muscovites. Confronted with an anti-Christian poem
he commissioned, the literary editor Berlioz dismisses it. While the poem
imagines Jesus in ‘very dark hues’ (5), it has the temerity to suggest Jesus
lived at all. Berlioz stresses: ‘the main point was not whether Jesus had been
good or bad, but that he had never existed as an individual, and that all the
stories about him were mere inventions, simple myths’ (5). As Berlioz edits an
‘important literary journal’ and is ‘chairman of the board of one of the
largest literary associations in Moscow’ (3), his extreme anti-Christianity is
implied to be prominent in Soviet high-culture. As a director of this culture,
he both consumes and feeds its dominant ideology. This ideology cannot accept a
man called Jesus said some wise things; it cannot even accept that wise words apocryphally
accrued to a real rabbi over centuries. This ideology must deny every trace of Christianity.
Speaking of Tacitus’ mention of Christ’s execution in the Annals, Berlioz explains this is ‘nothing more than a later
spurious insertion’ (6). While searching for holes in historical documents is
healthy scholarship, baselessly asserting holes exist is malpractice. Quite anathema
to rationalism, Berlioz makes his anti-Christianity unfalsifiable. To any
document attesting Christ’s existence, he will yell: ‘Spurious insertion!’ He
will say this upon no counterevidence – spare that Jesus could not possibly
have existed, thus any evidence to the contrary must be flawed.
The suppression of the Master’s manuscript,
chronicling Pontius Pilate with Jesus’ relationship, emphasises the
propagandistic role of Soviet literary culture. After publishers refuse his manuscript,
the Master ‘opened a newspaper and found an article by the critic Ariman, who
warned all and sundry that he [the Master] … had attempted to smuggle an
apology for Jesus Christ into print’ (161). The Master finds three more
articles denouncing his manuscript – his unpublished manuscript. His critics
accuse him of ‘Pilatism’ (161), implying a broader literary trend regarding
Pilate. Just a page before, however, one of the editors who refused the
manuscript disproves the existence of such a trend; he calls Pontius Pilate a
‘strange subject’ (160), that is, an uncommon one. As a way to further dismiss
the Master’s manuscript, critics diagnose it an example of an insidious
literary trend, a trend of which the manuscript is the sole, unpublished,
example.
Then there’s the hyperbolic phrase,
‘apology for Jesus Christ’. From what the audience reads of the Master’s
manuscript, we see no defence of Christ, or rather, no defence of the divine
Christ. The manuscript contradicts many details of the Christ story, even
suggesting that the gospels’ ur-text is but the exaggerations of the zealous
Matthew. (‘I [Yeshua/Jesus] glanced into his parchment and was horrified. I
never said a word of what was written there’ (21-2).) The manuscript leaves
ambiguous the divinity of Yeshua (Jesus). At most, Yeshua intuits that Pontius
Pilate has a headache and wants to return to his dog. Then again, it is possible
to read a headache on a person’s face, and to hear tell a man has a dog; Yeshua
might merely be a cold-reader. This is the ‘apology for Jesus Christ’ the
literary critics polemicize against, a Jesus even an atheist can believe.
These critics do not defend rationalism;
they defend ideology. Like Berlioz, they will not accept the modest claim that
a philosopher called Jesus existed. For if Jesus existed, they might have to
contend with what he says. If he is a myth, however, then all he says is fancy,
and thus not worth listening to by educated men.
While Bulgakov satirises those who
subjugate truth to ideology, he does suggest an alternate mode of truth, one
based not in fact, but art. The Master’s manuscript matches Satan’s description
of events; that is, the Master’s manuscript echoes an eye witness account. But
it could not have done. The sheer improbability that two thousand years after
the fact a man could describe events exactly as they happened is too much. But then
the Master does not report facts, but creates truth. At the climax, the Master
meets the subject of his novel, Pontius Pilate, still waiting to converse with
Yeshua after two thousand years. Satan informs the Master he can free Pilate,
and simultaneously ‘finish [his] novel with a single phrase’ (387). So the
Master tells Pilate, ‘You are free! You are free! He waits for you!’, allowing
Pilate to ascend to Yeshua. The Master does not merely recreate reality, but
creates it whole cloth; he does not recount Pilate’s ascension, but causes it.
Quotes and page numbers taken from the 1967 Mirra Ginsburg translation, from Grove Press, published 1995. Can be bought here
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