The Devil in Moscow

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny. 394 pages. Harper & Row $5.95

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Mirra Ginsburg. 402 pages. Grove Press. $5.95.

Out of atheist Russia, a Bible story! After more than a quarter of a century of suppression, The Master and Margarita, by Soviet Novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, has surfaced as a magazine serial in Russia, and in two translations in the U.S. The full text is published by Harper & Row, and the cut-down Russian version by Grove Press. Doubtless the U.S. publishers are right in claiming that the novel is "the most talked-about literary work in Russia today." Bulgakov, who died in 1940, is officially described in the Soviet Encyclopaedia as "a slanderer of Soviet reality." The work can now be seen for what it is: a seriocomic parable of great satiric force that draws its strength from a source still unacceptable in Russia--the Scriptures.

The Cat's Whiskers. The book covers only four days in the '20s and '30s, and tells of a limited group of Soviet citizens--a handful of writers and professionals in the arts. But it raises sharper and more painful questions about Communism than does Pasternak's lugubrious historical panorama in Doctor Zhivago. Bulgakov's theme is political power as an adversary of human goodness. He uses a diabolic apparition that descends on Moscow to expose the corruption of those who play their assigned roles in Communist society.

A poet named Bezdomny has brilliantly executed a commission, a poem on Christ, but although it is correctly derisive, his work commits the error of assuming that Christ actually existed. Bezdomny's editor, Berlioz, is straightening out his tame poet on his shaky ideology when the Devil arrives to straighten them both out. Beautifully dressed, learned and well-spoken (the Prince of Darkness being a gentleman), Satan is amused by their respectable atheism. To teach them a lesson about his powers--and about the reality of the supernatural--he turns soothsayer and predicts that the editor will be beheaded by a woman. The Devil saunters off, accompanied by a scarecrow figure in checked trousers and a cat "the size of a pig, black as soot and with luxuriant cavalry officer's whiskers." The prophecy is quickly fulfilled when the editor is decapitated under a streetcar driven by a woman.

From this point onward, Bulgakov's novel fans out into a frenzy of manic action in which Moscow is virtually taken over by the Devil and his attendant demiurges. These take their supernatural business for granted, while, in contrast, many plain Soviet citizens are deprived of their Marxist grasp of material reality by the apparition of the Devil, and behave like lunatics. First the poet, then assorted officials, unhinged by their attempts to explain the inexplicable, wind up in the psychiatric center.

Commissar Pilate. Bulgakov's novel is highly complicated, though there is consistency within the fantasy. He has succeeded in bringing the fear endemic to life under Stalin to a level where it can be borne--as excruciating comedy. Yet, while entertained by the absurd carryings-on of the Devil in Moscow, the reader is also made aware that grave matters of eternal importance are being decided behind the showy fireworks.

These matters are focused on a vaguely Faustlike figure. He is a reject from the Soviet system, a solitary, unpublished author known as the Master, who has written a novel probing into the conscience of Pontius Pilate. The point will not be lost on Soviet readers who have been impotent witnesses of so many show trials at which innocent men have been condemned.

Satan seizes the Master's manuscript and, in the Communist manner, proceeds to rewrite history. He allows the Biblical Pilate the satisfaction of killing Judas, and the further mercy of believing that the Crucifixion never took place at all. Thus does the Devil bless mankind by giving it a comfortable lie by which to live. The Master can forget his obsession and remains in peace with his beautiful mistress Margarita (who has given up a promising career as a witch for his sake). But Bulgakov makes clear his own belief: Pilate's guilt, an expedient cowardice that allows power to destroy good men, still lies on Russia.

Bulgakov's last irony is a tortured one supported by an epigraph from Goethe's Faust, to the effect that the Devil is the force that "wills forever evil yet does forever good." The Communist road of good intentions gives way to the hell of Soviet reality; this is Bulgakov's message--the essence of his "slander."

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