Painful Voices

All authority is a form of violence against the people. There will come a day when there will be no rulers, no Caesars, no authority of any kind.

Though the professed aim of Communism is eventually to do away with all government, such words can hardly please the well-entrenched rulers of the Soviet Union. Even less so, in fact, when they are put in the mouth of none other than Jesus Christ, making his first appearance in Soviet literature in many years. And, to top matters off, the novel containing the passage, The Master and Margarita, was written by Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in disgrace in 1940 and is described by the official Big Soviet Encyclopaedia as a "slanderer of Soviet reality."

Even more remarkable is the fact that The Master and Margarita has become the most talked about work in Russia today. It was published in two installments in the liberal monthly Moskva, of which Soviet readers have already bought 150,000 copies (the novel has yet to appear in book form). Soviet critics, many of whom have declared it a masterpiece, discuss it endlessly. Bulgakov wrote six plays and five novels, but The Master and Margarita, which critics knew existed but had never seen in print, is perhaps his most daring work. Its publication for the first time in Russia is part of a literary rebellion that is sweeping through Soviet letters. The Kremlin is watching in dismay, but has so far tried to contain rather than crush the new independence.

The novel describes how Satan ("the master") comes to Moscow in the 1930s to cast a spell on the inhabitants. The characters, all lacking orthodox Marxian solemnity, range from a talking cat to a chambermaid who flits about her employer's flat in fluttering nudity. One of its most interesting scenes is a re-enactment of Christ's encounter with

Pilate, in which Christ tells the Roman procurator that power must crumble before truth. Pilate, a baffled autocrat who suffers from psychosomatic headaches, asks the same question that is recorded in the New Testament: "What is truth?"*His prisoner, who is pictured as a man shrewd in his simplicity, replies: "The truth now is that your head aches. It aches so hard that you are thinking of death. And I've unwillingly become your executioner."

Intensified Debate. Heads in the Kremlin also suffer pains whenever Moskva or Novy Mir, the leading journal in the liberal upsurge, comes out on the stands. The most recent issue of Novy Mir is running a memoir by Boris Pasternak, whose work has been suspect ever since he allowed his Doctor Zhivago to be published in the West (where it ultimately sold 4,500,000 copies). The sketch relates how Pasternak once wrote to Stalin with sarcastic thanks for sparing him the same official adulation accorded Vladimir Mayakovsky, one of the great heroes of Soviet literature, and thus saving him from "blowing up my own importance." Evoking contempt for Mayakovsky, Pasternak says that his work "was introduced by force, like potatoes under Catherine the Great." The liberal monthly Molodaya Gvardia recently attacked an even more sacrosanct Soviet idol, Maxim Gorky. It dismissed the author of The Lower Depths as nothing more than "a fairly good documentary journalist."

While looking on such heresy with a certain amount of ambiguity, the Kremlin has decided to make an example of Novy Mir. Though its poet-editor, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, 57, contends that "I am a Communist in all the complexity of my soul," the party removed him from the Central Committee, recently fired two of his editors and replaced them with three safer editors. Two weeks ago, it rebuked the magazine for "a lopsided showing of reality" and "ideological errors and drawbacks."

Unforgivable Sin. Yet the fact that Tvardovsky has been able to print what he has shows that official restraints have loosened considerably. It was only a year ago that Authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were sentenced to labor camps for critical works--though their unforgivable sin was that they published them in the West. The debate between liberals and dogmatists will intensify as the time approaches for next month's Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers--the first conclave of its kind in eight years. As for Tvardovsky, he still hopes to succeed in an ambitious new project: publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russia for the first time.

-In St. John's account, Pilate does not wait for a reply, which inspired Francis Bacon to begin his essay Of Truth with the words: "What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

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