Summer Reading Club: The Master and Margarita
Who wants to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s legendary satire The Master and Margarita? Once again, the Summer Reading Club (we always already have matching satin jackets) is taking on a tome or two. Read the Burgin-O’Connor translation along on this schedule:
Sunday, June 14th, chs. I-IV, pp. 1-45
Sunday the 21th, V-XVI, pp.45-153
Sunday the 28th, big push, XVII-XXVI, pp.154-280
then the last fifty pages, either for Sunday the 5th of July or maybe we get ‘er done before the 4th of July, a natural piece of punctuation for the summer
Open thread below.
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Comment by poc2666 | June 17, 2020
Wow, do I love this book.
I’ve finished M&M (thanks to an Audible recording with a fantastic and delightful reader) but promise no plot spoilers in these comments.
So, it turns out there are three interwoven storylines:
1. The devil’s several day visit to Moscow, which begins w the opening scene on the park bench—key theme here is a vigorous dispute about the reality of Jesus and of the devil himself, with the devil exercising a vast epistemological advantage to satirize the Stalinist realism, and dream of mastering reality, of a clever, learned, but vastly over-confident literary journal editor Berlioz and young poet Ivan.
This plot line expands into a wholesale literal and metaphorical trashing of theater, poetry, literature, and criticism in Soviet Moscow. Bulgakov returns again and again to the utter inability of intellectuals, artists, bureaucrats, accountants, police, and psychologists to even begin to grasp the reality of the devil, and lampoons in many ways the exasperated sense of maddened incomprehension and futile theorizing experienced by Muscovites in the face of a powerful visitor from a level of reality they steadfastly refuse to concede actually exists. The fearless and love-induced openness of Margarita to those very same wild and imaginative realms stands in starkest contrast to that entire (mostly male) cultural phalanx of realists and official arbiters and guardians of taste and order.
Another notable feature of the devil and his colorful entourage is their relative benignity and geniality—though they wreak havoc with the self serious “establishment,” no one actually really gets hurt, and certainly no one, even the most venal or self important, is damned in any palpable sense. Bulgakov cites and mimics Faust a couple times and strongly echoes Goethe’s pantheistic sense that the devil is formidably powerful but forced to be a collaborator w Yeshua and God in upholding cosmic order—a shadow force of black magic but more of a sower of counterfeit currency mayhem and satirical fun rather than actually being Evil or Death or Hellfire Incarnate.
2. Pontius Pilate’s philosophico-political encounter & conversation w Yeshua, sentencing and execution of same, and Pilate’s subsequent haunting and fascination w the Yeshua movement and the man he has executed out of a troubled and overdetermined sense of political expediency that masks a deep interest and desire to continue the abortive argument begun in Chapter 2 about the Kingdom of Truth, the goodness or evil of humanity, and the relative im/permanence and in/justice of Roman power. Initially it seems as though the devil himself narrates this encounter, but it emerges in Part Two that the devil is in fact citing the “Master’s” novel about Pontius Pilate, which Bulgakov mysteriously weaves through four or five consciousnesses, with an identical narrative voice.
3. Margarita’s active, intrepid, and redemptive love for the Master and his novel. Remarkably, though it is pretty clear that the Master is a stand in for the author himself, Bulgakov lavishes all of his narrative energy on Margarita and her wild journey through five dimensional reality. Most of her time in the story she is naked but utterly unashamed—an Eve brace utterly unrepentant deeply devoted but never subordinate to the Adamic Master. In fact Bulgakov has her pretty much carrying him and his art and saving it. She is a warm and compelling hero.
This novel is a brilliant Menippean satire, whose generic features are described in Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky—I’ll summarize that illuminating Bakhtinian genre analysis in my comments next week.
Comment by adkriefall | June 18, 2020
You’d think I would love this book too, but for some reason I can’t figure out I don’t. (I think I’m more interested in figuring out why I don’t love this book than I am in the book itself.) I’ll see if I can put together some comments for next week, but I just finished this week’s chunk about a half hour ago, so I’ll save my comments for the zooming.
Comment by poc2666 | June 20, 2020
Since Pat has had a rough week, I’ll take a stab at summarizing some of today’s Zoom discussion, and let Pat (or anyone in this land of the free!) add, embellish, or otherwise supplement.
We began with a gloomy Pat voicing disappointment w Bulgakov’s book. The characters seem like small fish to fry in the fires of the devil’s mayhem. What’s the point? He ends up feeling sad at the torment suffered by the devil’s victims, rather than enjoying the humor of the colorful situations and confusions caused by the devilry. He was struck by the range of powers enjoyed by the devil and entourage.
Josh Malbin remarked that it is a novel (so far) without a lead character, and thus, as more of a satirical ensemble, none of the characters acquired depth. But he (Malbin) is enjoying it as satire.
Misha said he was enjoying the sendup of the sheer immensity of the literary apparatus, and appreciated a world where literature and art enjoys such prominence as the stuff of everyday life. He also commented on the vividness of the novel’s physical descriptions.
We puzzled for some time over this question as to why Bulgakov avoids making either the devil or his victims in the literary establishment very serious moral beings, and why there are so many “small fish” squabbling over “small potatoes” like status, money, or imported shoes from France. There is no Dostoevskian crime and punishment, no starving masses, and even the asylum seems like a relatively safe space.
Andreas offered the generalization that the novel seems to be more of a satire of the very smallness of this Soviet world than a grappling w any character’s evils or decisions. It is a novel about the loss of spiritual and imaginative worlds, and thus all that is left are these squabbling, grasping bureaucrats and literary society membership card holders — several of whom, Misha said, recognize that they are not really great or even good writers. At one level, in Andreas’ opinion, the novel is striving (via the devil’s show and black magic) to blow that small world wide open and reconnect with the spiritual drama of Pilate and Jesus, and with the freedoms and pleasures of imagination. We opened the question, to be continued, of how to relate the Pontius Pilate story frame to the devil’s exploits in Moscow.
Josh K made the telling observation that none of the characters really seems to be able to choose when confronted w a deal by the devil. The devil has his way in this world, and no one is free to resist temptation or find another path. Pat observed that only once characters reach the asylum, or flee to Leningrad, or are transported to Yalta can they escape the workings of the devil’s tricks.
Misha made a very penetrating observation that there are two settings where characters really do listen and connect in ways not evident on the streets, in the theater, or in the offices and (hotly sought after) apartments of Moscow:
1. In the conversations between the doctor and Ivan in the asylum. &
2. In the exchange between Pilate and Jesus (and to a certain extent also Caiaphas) in that setting.
Both the doctor but more especially Pilate seem to be thoughtful and intelligent and responsive in ways not at all obvious in the literary institutions that dominate the devil’s actions.
Pat and others observed that the asylum is more a safe space, “a holding place for characters,” than a realistic depiction of Stalinist re-education camps or gulags—and Bulgakov seems not to be targeting that space for satire or mayhem as he does w Moscow scenes.
Andreas asked these two broad questions that might be interesting once we’ve all read more next week:
1. How do actions/themes in the Pilate world relate to actions in the Moscow world? How do Pilate and Jesus relate to the devil?
2. Since Bulgakov signals some distance between his fictional Jesus and Matthew’s notes regarding him (presumably the raw material that will expand into canonical gospels—which Jesus himself says got a lot wrong), what is the author’s purpose in renarrating (mostly from Pilate’s pov) the Pilate/Jesus encounter and even the crucifixion itself in the form of a realist modern novel narrative?
Comment by adkriefall | June 20, 2020
PS: Pat and Misha had an interesting exchange about how far the devil’s/demons’ powers extend—certainly even the demons know regular people’s thoughts. The devil foretells the future w deadly accuracy. And they exercise remarkable physical powers like ripping off and reinstalling a head on a stage manager, and transporting a financial director all the way to Yalta in an instant. But, Malbin asked, where is God in all of this crazy action? Where is ultimate power located, and ultimate truth?
I thought those too would be good overarching questions for ask.
Comment by adkriefall | June 20, 2020
Bakhtin on menippean satire.
One of the many delights of reading Bakhtin is the fact that he read seemingly everything written in western literature over 2000 years—at least in Greek, Latin, Russian, French, English, and German—and that extraordinary erudition enabled him to see genre and generic patterns, esp in prose narrative, in deep lines of historical pattern very few of us could detect.
In accounting for the extraordinary richness of intellectual dialogue and the dramatic tensions that emerge in both the novels themselves and in the criticism on Dostoevsky (w endless debates about whose “side” shows the “real” meaning of Dostoevsky’s novels—social realism or mystic symbolism, Ivan or Alyosha, Raskolnikov or Sonya or the police, the Underground Man or Zosima)—Bakhtin not only invented his suggestive “polyphonic novel” metaphor, but fleshed out the roots of that multi-voiced, unfinalized form in various strands of both elite culture and of folk traditions like carnival. Chapter Four “Characteristics of Genre” in his Dostoevsky book is a remarkable essay tracing the roots of genre favoring open-ended, laughter-filled ambivalent portrayals of contemporary problems and questions over “monologIc seriousness” and one-sided official accounts of morality, politics, and reality itself.
“The fact is that a combination of adventurism with the posing of acute problematic questions, with a dialogic approach, with the confession, with the Life and the sermon was by no means something absolutely new and never before existing. The only new thing was Dostoevsky’s polyphonic use and interpretation of generic combinations. Its roots reach back into the most remote antiquity. The adventure novel of the nineteenth century is only one of the branches -and a rather impoverished and deformed branch at that-of a powerful and multi-branched generic tradition, reaching, as we have said, into the depths of the past, to the very sources of European literature. We consider it essential to trace back this tradition precisely to its sources. One must not limit oneself to an analysis of the generic phenomena closest to Dostoevsky. We even intend to concentrate our main attention precisely on the sources. Therefore we must take leave of Dostoevsky for a time and leaf through some ancient pages, as yet almost totally unexamined in our scholarship, in the history of genres. This historical digression will help us to understand, in a deeper and truer way, the generic and plot-compositional charac- teristics of Dostoevsky’s works which to this day remain essentially unexplored in the literature on him. In addition, we believe this question has broader significance for the theory and history of literary genres.” (Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 105-6)
Bakhtin begins this historical dive by pointing to the emergence in late antiquity of “serio-comical” genres, distinguished by three generic traits:
1. PRESENT VS PAST. these genres are set in the contemporary world w its ongoing and unresolved debates and competing philosophies. They are not, like Homer and Hesiod and Sophocles, accounts of gods and heroes and ancient founders, but the issues of the day.
2. PLOTS OF FREE INVENTION VS LEGEND. The serio-comical genres are not bound by mythic plot or fate or tales passed down, but combine current ideas questions and experiences in an often chaotic adventure story that stresses the unexpected, the novel, and often the scandalous.
3. MULTI-STYLED, HETERO-VOICED stories vs EPIC, POETIC, DRAMATIC GENRES. Legendary material and allusion gets mixed w contemporary pratfalls and comedy, philosophical debate w hilarious adventures and satirical jokes, tales of death and afterlife blend w tales of prostitutes and criminals. Mingling and citation of different genres prevails over stylistic unity.
He begins w Socratic dialogue, emphasizing its setting in the public square, its often humorous and deeply ironic exchanges, its blending of myth and dialectic, and its opening up of the deepest and highest questions of meaning and purpose, truth and myth to discussion and debate in the market place of Athens. Menippean satire, a little known third century genre, allegedly shaped by a slave who became educated and who published satirical, controversial works known only by others’ accounts of them, extended this tradition. [continued below]
Comment by adkriefall | June 22, 2020
Bakhtin on menippean satire.
One of the many delights of reading Bakhtin is the fact that he read seemingly everything written in western literature over 2000 years—at least in Greek, Latin, Russian, French, English, and German—and that extraordinary erudition enabled him to see genre and generic patterns, esp in prose narrative, in deep lines of historical pattern very few of us could detect.
In accounting for the extraordinary richness of intellectual dialogue and the dramatic tensions that emerge in both the novels themselves and in the criticism on Dostoevsky (w endless debates about whose “side” shows the “real” meaning of Dostoevsky’s novels—social realism or mystic symbolism, Ivan or Alyosha, Raskolnikov or Sonya or the police, the Underground Man or Zosima)—Bakhtin not only invented his suggestive “polyphonic novel” metaphor, but fleshed out the roots of that multi-voiced, unfinalized form in various strands of both elite culture and of folk traditions like carnival. Chapter Four “Characteristics of Genre” in his Dostoevsky book is a remarkable essay tracing the roots of genre favoring open-ended, laughter-filled ambivalent portrayals of contemporary problems and questions over “monologIc seriousness” and one-sided official accounts of morality, politics, and reality itself.
“The fact is that a combination of adventurism with the posing of acute problematic questions, with a dialogic approach, with the confession, with the Life and the sermon was by no means something absolutely new and never before existing. The only new thing was Dostoevsky’s polyphonic use and interpretation of generic combinations. Its roots reach back into the most remote antiquity. The adventure novel of the nineteenth century is only one of the branches -and a rather impoverished and deformed branch at that-of a powerful and multi-branched generic tradition, reaching, as we have said, into the depths of the past, to the very sources of European literature. We consider it essential to trace back this tradition precisely to its sources. One must not limit oneself to an analysis of the generic phenomena closest to Dostoevsky. We even intend to concentrate our main attention precisely on the sources. Therefore we must take leave of Dostoevsky for a time and leaf through some ancient pages, as yet almost totally unexamined in our scholarship, in the history of genres. This historical digression will help us to understand, in a deeper and truer way, the generic and plot-compositional charac- teristics of Dostoevsky’s works which to this day remain essentially unexplored in the literature on him. In addition, we believe this question has broader significance for the theory and history of literary genres.” (Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 105-6)
Bakhtin begins this historical dive by pointing to the emergence in late antiquity of “serio-comical” genres, distinguished by three generic traits:
1. PRESENT VS PAST. these genres are set in the contemporary world w its ongoing and unresolved debates and competing philosophies. They are not, like Homer and Hesiod and Sophocles, accounts of gods and heroes and ancient founders, but the issues of the day.
2. PLOTS OF FREE INVENTION VS LEGEND. The serio-comical genres are not bound by mythic plot or fate or tales passed down, but combine current ideas questions and experiences in an often chaotic adventure story that stresses the unexpected, the novel, and often the scandalous.
3. MULTI-STYLED, HETERO-VOICED stories vs EPIC, POETIC, DRAMATIC GENRES. Legendary material and allusion gets mixed w contemporary pratfalls and comedy, philosophical debate w hilarious adventures and satirical jokes, tales of death and afterlife blend w tales of prostitutes and criminals. Mingling and citation of different genres prevails over stylistic unity.
He begins w Socratic dialogue, emphasizing its setting in the public square, its often humorous and deeply ironic exchanges, its blending of myth and dialectic, and its opening up of the deepest and highest questions of meaning and purpose, truth and myth to discussion and debate in the market place of Athens. Menippean satire, a little known third century BCE genre, allegedly shaped by a slave who became educated and who published satirical, controversial works (including satires of both Stoicism and Epicureanism, the dominant schools of the time) known only by others’ accounts of them, extended this tradition. [continued below] Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’ Golden Ass are later Latin versions of the genre. To the debating and probing of contemporary ideas, the menippean satire adds two elements in much greater extent and intensity: first, the comedic and ironic and satirical is foregrounded much more than in the Socratic dialogue. Second, to the debates and dialectic are added fantastic adventures, travels in other worlds including afterlife, often in startling combination with what Bakhtin sweetly and politely calls “slum naturalism,” the gritty realities usually of urban life w its mixing of classes and types.
“The most important characteristic of the menippea as a genre is the fact that its bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic and ad- venture is internally motivated, justified by and devoted to a purely ideational and philosophical end: the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth, embodied in the image of a wise man, the seeker of this truth. We emphasize that the fantastic here serves not for the positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it. To this end the heroes of Menippean satire ascend into heaven, descend into the nether world, wander through unknown and fantastic lands, are placed in extraordinary life situations (Diogenes, for example, sells himself in- to slavery in the marketplace, Peregrinus”‘ triumphantly immolates himself at the Olympic Games, Lucius the Ass finds himself constantly in extraordinary situations). Very often the fantastic takes on the character of an adventure story; sometimes it assumes a symbolic or even mystical-religious character (as in Apuleius). But in all these instances the fantastic is subordinated to the purely ideational function of provoking and testing a truth.” (114)
I think these Bakhtinian remarks on the menippean genre constitute a very fruitful frame for understanding M & M.
Comment by adkriefall | June 22, 2020
Thanks for plugging that in, Andreas. I’ve been wondering about what this book is doing from a genre standpoint. This is chewy!
Comment by Josh K-sky | June 23, 2020
Yes, thanks tremendously, Andreas. I don’t think the Menippean satire is necessarily the best way to think about Crime and Punishment or other of Dostoevsky’s classically plotted novels –as always, Bakhtin refuses to take the narrative side of narrative fiction seriously, and he’s unwilling to think about how character can create plot– but what is less convincing in Bakhtin about the novels he’s allowed to talk about becomes extremely strong about novels that I imagine he isn’t allowed to talk about, and everything he says here applies to Bulgakov much better than it applies to Dostoevsky.
Comment by poc2666 | June 28, 2020
Stuff we talked about:
POC [rubbing his hands]: Now we’re cookin’. We finally got ourselves an actual plot. Go Margarita! Rescue the Master! Be witchy and queenly, but not selfish!
JAM: [judiciously] Slow down, slow down. Let’s run through the episodes to see what’s useful for talking about this book.
JGW [flashing his favorite Bosch paintings]: The devil scenes are still where all the fun is, whether in Moscow (the forced opera singing, the invisible bureaucrat) or at Satan’s Ball. And Margarita’s first actions as a witch are revenge. She is righteous action at the DRAMLIT apartment building before she comes back to do the job that the devils require her to do.
MWAH [protesting that those aren’t really his middle initials]: This is still a story about writers and writing. Who owns the story of Jesus? Woland says he was a witness and was there first; The Master wrote the novel, although he burned it; and Matthew is the one who gets permission from Pilate to keep writing his version of it.
JJK [trying to wrap it all into one grand theory]: The story of Jesus has been rewritten as a story of the relation between truth and power; the Master has truth but no power: he was about to fall victim to censorship and self-censorship, abandoning the quest to tell the truth because of the power of others; Margarita channels the power of the devils, who have power but don’t actually care for the truth, to rescue the Master so that he can return to telling his truth. Like Scott Pilgrim, she levels up thanks to the Power of Love! [Okay, maybe I added that comparison.]
MH: Hey, he’s got a story and the power to write, but it’s not really the truth, is it? They are arguing over the power of fiction, not the right to tell the truth.
[An interlude on the Pilate-Afranius section: two choices, undecidable so far: Pilate is deceived about Afranius’s “failed” attempt to carry out Pilate’s orders and protect Judas Iscariot; or, Pilate employed double-talk to convey, with plausible deniability, that he actually wanted Afranius to kill Judas, which he does. But what kind of plausible deniability does Pilate need? Well, in his dreams he and Yeshua are moonlight philosophers and friends.]
POC: Andreas says that this is a Menippean satire, and he’s right: its roots are not in plot and characterization, but in philosophy, anarchic humor, and feckless mixing of high and low registers and subordinate genres. So it’s not a nineteenth-century novel driven by character–
JJK: Boo characterization! Yay fairy tales!
POC: –but the Satan’s Ball scene does have a relationship to the least “epic” part of Dante’s Inferno: the settling of scores with great sinners, of long ago and of super-recent vintage. True, the novel’s purpose seems not to be moral in the traditional way–
JGW and JAM: None of these Muscovites are going to “learn their lesson” from being tricked by the devil, and the devils don’t have any interiority, so they can’t learn or change either–
POC: –but I can’t help thinking that Margarita risked her soul by cutting a deal with the devils, so for the last fifty pages that’s the “loose end” that I’m going to be watching for: Can she really channel the power of the devils to create a bubble of happiness between a fragile novelist and a recently empowered witch/muse? And won’t The Police State and the Fight Over Real Estate win out over all?
What else of worth did I leave out of this summary? Andreas, Bret, we missed you!
Comment by poc2666 | June 28, 2020