The traditional pro-Soviet rendition of The
Master and Margarita does not agree
with the true content. Mikhail Bulgakov
aimed his satire at real persons depicted as
the Master and Margarita.

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita:
the true content

by Alfred Barkov

Published: 1994. Kiev, Ukraine ISBN 5-7707-7064-3 (in Russian, 300 p.)

UCH pretentious has been said about Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margatita since it was first published nearly thirty five years ago. The list of high-toned works devoted to the novel seems to be the same endless as the notorious everlasting love between the Master and Margarita.

The officious concept avows that in the novel, Mikhail Bulgakov depicted himself and his last wife as the Master and Margarita. That dictates the necessity to render these characters as strictly positive, and the relations between the Master and Margarita as exalted. The misleading pro-Soviet and pro-Stalinist concept prevents the readers from noticing in the text the manifold elements indicating that the true content is completely different from the imposed interpretation.

Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita has been still misinterpreted

The forms in which Bulgakov presented the 'key' elements are different. These elements are scattered over the text, some of them being of linguistic origin and performed in a binary form. To comprehend the real meaning of such cues, it is necessary to compare similar expressions located several chapters apart. The prejudiced attitude to the content of The Master and Margarita prevents even the Russian scholars from noticing the subtle wordplays. In cases of translations, the situation is even more sreious. Being unaware of the real content of The Master and Margarita, the translators are unable to grasp and transfer the lexical peculiarities of the key elemetnts while some parts of the text must be translated with special precision. That is true even with one of the recent translations of The Master and Margarita into English performed by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. While in the original text such elements produce at least subconscious associations among those who can read Russian, their absence in the translated versions deprives the readers even of that opportunity.

Unfortunately, following the dogmatic opinion of the Russian oficious establishment which still dominates in the Bulgakov studies, the Western scholars merely reproduce the erroneous maxims without questioning their efficacy. I will mention just some of them.

In Russia, for the last few centuries the notion of master has been the central point of controversy. The adherents of the poetical approach insist that the creative literary process requires the ability to feel and comprehend lyrics while the advocates of the mastery concept assert that everybody can be trained to become a poet — much in the same way the shoe-makers are trained.

After the 1917 October revolt, the Soviet establishment launched a campaign aimed at irradication the 'obsolete bourgeois culture' and replacing it with the 'proletarian' one. That stage of the horrible process was depicted by Bulgakov in his novella The Heart of a Dog.

To replace the exterminated class of the intelligentsia, the poorly educated 'proletarians' with the dog's hearts were hastily trained to become poets, writers and dramatists. These Masters comprised the new literary establishment defined in The Master and Margarita as the MASSOLIT (in the book Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita: the true content, I argue that Bulgakov meant that satirical abbreviation to stand for The MASters of the SOviet LITerature.)

The scholars engaged in the Bulgakov studies still disregard the fact that the Mastery concept was consistently interjected by the Communist state, and that the process was conrolled personally by Stalin. Its ideological base was elaborated by the then Minister of Culture A.V. Lunacharsky. It was Lunacharsky who forced the Mastery policy into application as an integral part of the Communist party 'anti-bourgeoisie' ideological strategy (in The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov depicted that odious person as Sempleyarov, the Director of Theatres and Shows, and as critic Latunsky.)

Likewise, it has been overlooked that Bulgakov created the plot of The Master and Margarita as a sarcastic parody of A. Lynacharsky's 'revolutionary' drama Faust and the City. It should be noted that in the early versions of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov named Faust the character whom we have come to know as the Master. Moreover, Bulgakov had explicitly parodied the same Lunacharsky's drama Faust and the City in his very first anti-Communist novel The White Guard (1925). There is no doubt that was the very reason why the magazine in which The White Guard was being published was closed so hastily that the publication of the novel was not completed. It was several decades later that the Soviet public got an opportunity to read the complete version of The White Guard.

These and many other similar facts are bluntly ignored by the Russian literary scholarship. Instead, it nourishes the allegation that all troubles with the publication of Bulgakov's works were coming from the people of Jewish origin who allegedly prevented improving relations between Bulgakov and Stalin. It has become a regretable tradition to mention some 'non-Russian' names and cite the cituation depicted in The Master and Margarita in which some critic Latunsky carried out the campain denigrating the Master and his novel. Factually, it was Lunacharsky who has initiated in 1928 the anti-Bulgakov campaign. In his speech in the Communist Party Central Committee, he labelled Bulgakov as 'the most anti-Soviet writer' and accused the same persons with the 'non-Russian' names of promoting Bulgakov's dramas to be staged.

All that has been consistently ignored by the Russian critics who recognized themselves in the Master and Margarita as the MASSOLIT functionaries. They still pretend not to notice that it was exactly in 1928 that Bulgakov began writing The Master and Margarita — just after Lunacharsky had launched the anti-Bulgakov campain; that the character Latunsky was not intended by Bulgakov as a Jew but rather as Lunacharsky whose origin was of a Russian nobility kin. Incidently, Bulgakov and Lunacharsky acquired high education by attending the same HM Emperor Alexander High School in Kiev (Bulgakov depicted that school in The White Guard.)

The text of The Master and Margarita contains multiple indications that in the figure of the Master Bulgakov portrayed famous Russian writer Alexei ('Maxim') Gorky of whom Stalin made the official superintendent of the whole Soviet literary process. It was Gorky to whom the Soviet propaganda attached the title of Master. Upon his death in 1936, the official Communist Party daily Pravda described him as 'the Master'. But the very first person to whom the definition of Master was publicly applied by the writers was Stalin. In February 1936, the plenary session of the Board of the Union of the Soviet Writers (headed by M. Gorky) sent a greeting cable to Stalin. It contained the words: "You are the best master of life, comrade Stalin!" The text of the greeting address was published in the Soviet press exactly when Mikhail Bulgakov had been working on The Master and Margarita.

As the night-hag Margarita in Bulgakov's novel, Maria Andreyeva seems to have been squint as well. — Click here to enlarge. (When this beautiful woman was fourteen, she entertained herself with cutting cats' throats.)

If the text of The Master and Margatita is read a bit more attentively, it becomes clear that there has never existed between the Master and Margarita anything which could be described as everlasting love. The image of Margarita has been intended by Bulgakov as that of a debauched prostitute employed by the sinister powers. In the early versions of The Master and Margarita that was pronounced more expressly. Numerous details contained in The Master and Margatita indicate that the person from whom Bulgakov modelled Margarita was the most beautiful Russian actress Maria Andreyeva. Before the Russian revolutions, when the Bolsheviks (the Communists) were in the underground, she became a special assistant to Vladimir Lenin (just as Gella in The Master and Margatita was an assistant to Woland, and Bulgakov underlined the genetic relation between the images of explicite vampire Gella and Margarita.) On Lenin's assignment, Maria Andreyeva recruited talented writer A.M. ('Maxim') Gorky to serve the Bolsheviks (this situation is also depicted allegorically in The Master and Margatita.) Available materials present grounds for a conclusion that besides being Lenin's assistant, Maria Andreyeva might have been an agent provocateur of the Tzarist secret police spying on Lenin's political faction. (See Chapter 24 of the analysis of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita.)

Maria Andreyeva, Margarita in Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, and M. Gorky whom Bulgakov portrayed as the Master

In The Master and Margarita,, Bulgakov did not restrict the main idea to an allegorical description of M. Gorky's and M. Andreyeva's life story. The philosophy of his novel appears to be much deeper and more sophisticated than it is assumed within the traditional interpretation. The so called 'Russian idea' has been tackled in the novel, and Bulgakov's point of view happens to differ much from what is widely nourished in the Russian society. On the other hand, a well pronounced apologetic pro-Jewish leitmotif is evident as well. These last features add to the reasons why the true content of The Master and Margarita is subtly opposed in Russia. "Even if all that proves true, we do not need such Bulgakov anyway" is a typical reaction of some Russian media upon reading the results of the analysis.

The 300 p. book Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita: the true content was published in Kiev in 1994 (in Russian). As a translation into English is not available, I will attempt to render the content myself and add more rendered chapters as soon as they are ready.

Summary in English of the chapters of

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita:
the true content

The summary of the rest 41 chapters follows.

In 1996, there has been completed another book tackling the issues of Mikhail Bulgakov's true intention and the content of The Master and Margarita. A summary in English of its content can be spotted on the page: Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita: a literary mystification. The same method of analysis was applied to Hamlet by W. Shakespeare. As the paper has been written in Russian as well, I published a rendition in English on the page: Hamlet: a Tragedy of Errors or the Tragical Fate of Shakespeare?.

The version of the literary theory describing sush class of fiction is explained in English on other pages: New Literary Theory decoding Shakespeare's texts, and Literary Theory: a Scientific Approach.

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