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Feuilletons Don't Burn: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and the Imagined “Soviet Reader“

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Maria Kisel
Maria Kisel*
Affiliation:
University of Victoria in British Columbia
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Abstract

Maria Kisel argues that Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita can be read as a persuasive novel, intended to educate Soviet readers who, like the character Ivan Bezdomnyi, are ignorant of history and culture beyond their insulated Soviet reality. Kisel demonstrates how Bulgakov's novel coopts the form and themes of the Soviet satirical feuilleton to explain the virtues of the prerevolutionary cultural realm rooted in the western European intellectual tradition. To render his own cultural perspective accessible, Bulgakov revisits his early feuilletons written for the newspaper Gudok, a category of writings he claimed to disdain. The Master and Margarita demonstrates a complex relationship with the imagined “Soviet reader,“ who is both an object of ridicule and a desired interlocutor. Examining the connection between the Master and Ivan as analogous to the teacher and disciple dynamic between Bulgakov and his own “Soviet readers,” this article offers a new interpretation of this well-loved and much-discussed masterpiece.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 582 - 600
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

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22. Barratt draws parallels between Nakanune feuilletons and episodes of The Master and Margarita. See Barratt, Between Two Worlds. Haber's comparisons are more thorough and include Gudok feuilletons as well. Some of the feuilletons in her study overlap with mine, but our interpretations differ. See Haber, Mikhail Bulgakov.

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41. Numerous critics have commented on the thematic parallels between the Moscow and Jerusalem texts. While I acknowledge that the Jerusalem narrative mirrors the moral concerns of the present, I will not discuss this well-worn idea in detail as it has already been sufficiendy addressed by other critics. As early as 1972, Val Bolen noted that the same unresolved ediical and philosophical questions confront the characters in the historically disparate realities. Val Bolen, “Theme and Coherence in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita,” Slavic and East European Journal 16, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 427-37. See also Pope, Richard W. F., “Ambiguity and Meaning in The Master and Margarita: The Role of Afranius,” Slavic Review 36, no. 1 (March 1977): 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weeks, , “In Defense of the Homeless,” 45–65 Google Scholar.

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49. Ibid., 113.

50. Ibid., 185.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 291,189.

53. Ibid., 326.

54. Ibid., 333.

55. Ibid. A more accurate translation of this sentence is “But he also knows that there are certain things beyond his control.“

56. Avins, , “Reaching a Reader,” 284 Google Scholar.

57. Evidence exists that the author did have some hope of publishing his controversial novel. The play Batum (1939) about Iosif Stalin's youth was possibly a concession in an effort to publish The Master and Margarita. Milne notes that Bulgakov thought of Stalin “as the first reader” of his masterpiece. Milne, , Mikhail Bulgakov, 219-24Google Scholar. Marietta Chudakova writes that Bulgakov had read drafts of the novel to II ‘f and Petrov and the two authors told him that the work could be published if he were to “take out the ancient chapters.“ Chudakova, , Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova, 462 Google Scholar.