The Problem of Christ in The Master and Margarita

“Poetry is respected only in this country – people kill for it,” the Soviet Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam once said, simultaneously predicting his own fate. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” Mandelstam survived exile to the city of Voronezh, immortalized in verse as that raven, that knife, voron / nezh, only to be sent once more to die in a frigid far-east transit camp; Vladimir Mayakovsky, censored by Stalin, shot himself in the chest; Sergei Yesenin and Marina Tsvetaeva preferred hanging. Isaac Babel was executed by firing squad, a fate shared by almost all caught a decade later during the Night of the Murdered Poets. There are many ways to kill a writer. Anna Akhmatova, as with Nikolai Gogol a century prior, burned her own writings; Boris Pilnyak publicly renounced his, yet he was still executed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Yevgeny Zamyatin, barely able to escape the Soviet Union, died of a broken heart, lonely and penniless.

In no other dictatorship was poetry and art so hotly debated and punished by the leadership as in the Soviet Union. The highest levels of government routinely involved themselves in scrutinizing souls – even to the point of rewriting titles. “But he’s a master, isn’t he? Is he a master of his art?” Stalin infamously asked of Mandelstam in a surprise phone call to a stupefied Boris Pasternak. In Russia today, amid the return of state censorship, it is a question in need of being asked again, a question at the center of an important literary work of faith and its film adaptation released in early 2024.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one of the most-read Russian novels of the twentieth century. The film adaptation by director Michael Lockshin has become a surprise hit, amassing the highest ever domestic circulation for a film rated 18+, even amid calls for its censorship in Russia. Yet the improbable success and significance of both works is more than merely a response to censorship, as most of the Western coverage has made it out to be – in the Russia of today and the Soviet Union of yesterday, repression was never in short supply. Instead, it is about substance. It is in faith, the most serious of topics, that Bulgakov so effectively conveys his resistance to tyranny.

As the title suggests, the central plot of the novel revolves around two people. The Master is a writer who finds himself in the throes of despair as he drafts his novel from the perspective of Pontius Pilate and the trial of a certain Yeshua Ha-Nazri; Margarita Nikolaevna is a childless and unhappily married woman who falls abruptly and madly in love with the author, names him “Master,” and devotes her entire life to him and his magnus opus. Yet we are only introduced to the Master halfway through the novel; the first time we meet him he is committed to a psychiatric ward as he speaks to Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, a dimwitted poet nicknamed “Homeless,” who is unable to write anymore after witnessing the strange death of Mikhail Alexandrovitch Berlioz, his editor and the powerful head of a state-run literary association, at the hands of a mysterious foreign consultant.

The foreign consultant is truly foreign: he is the devil. He and his entourage of demons and a black cat have come to Moscow to seek out a society built on atheism. The epigraph that begins the novel is from Faust’s Mephistopheles – “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good” – as is the devil’s name, Woland, which is another alias for Mephistopheles. Berlioz and Homeless argue with the devil at Patriarch’s Pond: God cannot exist. Woland retorts that although he personally does not care, not only does God exist, but Berlioz will soon find out the seventh proof of his existence, and Berlioz, like any other man, is unable to plan anything of significance, for his death nears. (Rattled by the conversation, Berlioz then fulfills these words by slipping on spilled sunflower oil in front of a tram.) Woland plays many such tricks on Moscow, ranging from practical jokes on Moscow’s literary elite to murder and kidnapping. The only thing in Moscow he respects is the novel on Pilate (and perhaps Margarita), because, as Woland says, he saw it happen.

Vladimir Ryklin, How Behemoth the Cat and Woland Teach Us Morality, mixed media, 2021. Wikimedia Commons.

Everyone has read the Pilate novel. In fact, we are introduced to the Master’s work before we are introduced to the Master.  Margarita reads his novel to us, and we meet Woland, who has already lived through his novel, all before we meet the author. The Master’s life is collapsing around him – he loses absolutely everything, including Margarita for a time – yet in his work he finds the spark of redemption. “Your salvation now lies in only one thing – complete peace,” says the psychiatrist to Homeless, and this is the same reward that Matthew Levi, by God’s decree, bestows on the Master for his novel. Yet this reward comes too late for a truly happy ending, for Margarita has already sold her soul to the devil at Woland’s fantastical banquet, corresponding to the Walpurgis Night in Faust I. In the epilogue, Homeless dreams vividly of his fellow cellmate and the beautiful Margarita, as well as the vengeful procurator.

The novel itself exists outside of time. Its five chapters on Pilate are inserted in the middle of the other plot lines, acting as a spine; its plot continues after the events of the other chapters; the darkness around Yerushalayim, “the city hated by the procurator,” is the same darkness enveloping Moscow, the new Jerusalem (as Russians describe it). The novel is always told from the perspective of one of characters. Its plot loosely – emphasis on loosely – follows the Gospels until the end. Pontius Pilate interrogates a vagabond philosopher from Galilee, whom he tries to save, but, ultimately, the procurator succumbs to pressure by the Sanhedrin and condemns him to death. Next is the execution, which we (as Pilate) do not witness, though we witness afterwards testimony by Matthew Levi and Pilate’s confession in arranging the murder of Judas of Kiriath – a new addition. “What is truth?” Pilate asks of Yeshua and, by extension, of the novel and the reader. We hear little of the actual conversations between Pilate and Yeshua – with one notable exception. All men are good, Yeshua tells the cruel procurator of Judea, a crazy line from a perceived madman that tears through Pilate’s soul. Bulgakov apparently intends this to be Yeshua’s (and therefore his own) cri de coeur.

To be a master in Russia is dangerous. Mikhail Bulgakov, a rare survivor, knew this firsthand. He was forced to rework his first novel, The White Guard, and release it as a play: The Days of the Turbins. It made his reputation in the Soviet Union, sympathetically portraying an anti-Bolshevik middle-class family like his own, a Kyiv family whose support of the White Army ruins them. The topic was a risky one. Stalin saw the play more than a dozen times, and then declared another one of Bulgakov’s plays on the same theme (Flight) to be “anti-Soviet.” Bulgakov was effectively forced out of the theaters overnight. He turned inward, destroying his work at least twice, and claiming that while his first novel was inspired by his mother, his second and last novel was inspired by his father, a professor at Kyiv Theological Academy. “And personally, with my own hands, I threw into the stove the draft of a novel about the devil,” Bulgakov wrote of what would become his most important work, The Master and Margarita, in one of his courageous though futile letters to Stalin pleading for his freedom.

There is nothing like The Master and Margarita in Russian literature. It is the most remarkable of all the “desk-drawer literature,” the rumored manuscripts secreted away in nooks and crannies of bookshelves and desks across Eastern Europe, shared by their creators with only the closest of confidants, waiting for a time when freedom of speech would allow for the possibility of publishing. Bulgakov himself would never see the day. He had intermittently worked on the novel from 1928 to 1940, but before he could finish his edits, he died of nephrosclerosis, the same condition that claimed his father. Published a quarter century later, after Stalin’s death, the novel remains unfinished. More than that, it remains mangled. Even today, many editions of The Master and Margarita are based on the censored Moskva edition that cut 14,000 words, partly out of considerations of space, partly because of politics.

At the time of Bulgakov’s near descent into madness from censorship, many Soviet academic presses were becoming increasingly fixated on “the problem of Christ,” claiming that Christ was only a mythological figure, no different from a fairy tale. It was not enough for the atheist Soviet Union to revile the Bible. Instead, state-sponsored literature fixated on the claim that Christ never existed, though this proved to be self-defeating, since the more Christ is mentioned, the more he becomes a part of the historical world. In 1929, at the Second Congress of Atheists, Mayakovsky (before his censorship) warned of the potential for “danger that will come from literature – the possibility to appear some religious writer, who works consciously and religiously.” In other words, Bulgakov.

This fear is repeated in the opening scene of the novel. Woland – the devil, or at least a facsimile of him inspired by Faust’s Mephistopheles – effectively chastises the Soviet literary world for not believing that Jesus existed, although Woland cares little whether they believe in Christ’s message or not. “And keep in mind, Jesus existed,” Woland says. “He simply existed, that is all.” The three emerging and seemingly disparate narratives in the novel and film – Woland and his entourage’s mayhem in Moscow, the trial of Pontius Pilate, and the love story between Master and Margarita – are tied together through this larger theme: the matter of Christ’s existence in a world that doesn’t believe in God.

It is not a message that one has to look far for. Both Soviet Moscow and Roman Jerusalem were doomed cities that sinned and fell from great spiritual heights; on both stages the actors seek, and fail, to find a path to redemption. In Bulgakov’s Moscow, this is foreshadowed at the very beginning of the novel. “Man is unexpectedly mortal, that’s the problem” – Woland’s rebuke of Berlioz, the all-powerful editor, is answered in the Christian context by the fact that “the Son of Man” is unexpectedly immortal. But the Soviet atheists that Woland meets do not believe in God; they do not have this resource. Instead, abandoned to themselves, the great Soviet literary minds all fall for the cheapest of tricks and the most meager of rewards – a new dress, a party invite, a basement apartment. What about the love story between the Master and Margarita? Bereft of meaning in the sickly society they reject, the two suicidal lovers cannot find redemption through their love to each other, as we would expect in a love story, but only through the spark of the divine in the Master’s story of Pilate. In other words, in a world without faith, the lovers nonetheless muster faith and cling to it.

This premise is the source of Pilate’s difficult question: What is truth? Pilate fails to save Yeshua; worse, he executes him. Yet, by himself, his dreams tell him that what happened was fictional, that “today’s execution turned out to have been a sheer misunderstanding, for the philosopher, who had invented the incredibly absurd idea that all men were good, walked by his side; hence, he was alive.” But it did happen. Neither is Yeshua’s teaching that “all men are good” a milquetoast claim. A contemporary of Bulgakov, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, taught that sinat hinam, the baseless hatred that the sages claimed was the reason for the destruction of the Temple, could only be replaced by ahavat hinam, baseless love. All men are good: even the executioners and the NKVD agents? It is a baseless, completely baseless love.

Contemporary audiences understood the radicalness of Bulgakov’s treatment of faith. “After Bulgakov’s novel, it is impossible to doubt that the devil exists,” noted Dmitry Likhachev, the linguist and dissident. Likhachev himself had survived five years at Solovki, the notorious gulag in the Arctic Circle. (“Does proving there’s a devil prove that there’s a God?” toys the devil to Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and perhaps he posed the same question to Likhachev in the gulag.) Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco claimed that “for the first time in the conditions of the Soviet Union, Russian literature began to speak seriously about Christ as a reality standing in the depths of the world.” More recently, Andrey Kuraev, a protodeacon defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church after his condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, noted in his provocative book The Master and Margarita: For or against Christ? that among the forced exiles in the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Soviet Union, “Bulgakov’s spiritual relatives … were able to read the novel as a Christian work.”

It is easy enough to see the parallels in process between the book and film. The many attempts at adapting the book have failed so frequently there was talk of a curse – until director Michael Lockshin and screenplay writer Roman Kantor released their version this year. The film was originally meant to be called Woland, to be directed by Nikolai Lebedev, and to be a Netflix exclusive. Yet after money dried up, Lebedev left to direct yet another of his Russian propaganda films, Nuremberg, an alternate history of the Nuremberg trials where the Holocaust is never mentioned and perfidious Americans hide behind every Soviet shrub. Lockshin, of The Silver Skates fame, was asked to replace him. The first trailer was dropped in February of 2022, when editing was almost finished. But then Russian tanks started advancing toward Kyiv.

Lockshin almost immediately condemned the war, as did Yevgeny Tsyganov and Yulia Snigir, who played the Master and Margarita (and incidentally are married in real life). Universal Pictures cancelled its distribution; like the novel, the film was dead for the second time. But over the following two years, fighting off censors and working with a minimal budget, the crew performed what Lockshin described as a “miracle” – a film in Russia produced with “practically no censorship.” Critics like Kino Teatr described it as a “masterpiece”; others urged the world to see it before it was banned. “All the propagandists, on all the television channels, in the State Duma, shouted that I was a terrorist and threatened me with violence,” Lockshin told Meduza, an independent Russian media platform. “They also called me a traitor, although I am not even a citizen of Russia.” (Lockshin grew up in Russia but was born in the United States.)

The curse was at least lifted. During the previous serious attempt at a faithful rendering of Bulgakov’s novel, Vladimir Bortko, the director of an adaptation into a ten-part miniseries, distanced himself from the criticism by the Russian Orthodox Church that he was creating a “fifth Gospel”: “As Bulgakov did, we speak about Yeshua, not Jesus; about Ershalaim, not Jerusalem; and so on. The film has nothing to do with a religious subject.” It could be said, along with Rabbi Yechiel, the esteemed thirteenth-century Tosafist forced to defend the Talmud and its references to a certain Yeshua in the sham Disputation of Paris, that “not every Louis born in France is king.” But it is equally hard to see how a film with Pilate presiding over a trial on the first evening of Passover of Yeshua Ha-Nazri has nothing to do with religion.

Part of the success of the new attempt is that Lockshin effectively combined the plot of The Master and Margarita with the life of Bulgakov. The Master is now a successful playwright in the 1930s, producing a play on Pilate whose premiere is suspended mid-staging by the authorities. He is brought to a meeting at the union of writers to resolve the bureaucratic hang-up, which turns into a kangaroo court. Latunsky, a literary critic, and the NKVD agent Maigel denounce the Master’s play, to great fanfare from the crowd. Berlioz, his editor, publicly repents and issues an “an apology for religious obscurantism.” Erstwhile friends abandon the Master to his fate. “Yesterday it was possible, but today it’s no longer possible,” the Master is told.

In the original novel, the Master works at a museum and wins the lottery, finding his ticket in a basket of dirty laundry, which allows him freedom to write. In the movie, as with Bulgakov’s life, it is misfortune that forces the Master to write. Expelled from the literary world, he decides to write a novel on Pilate, moves into a basement apartment, and in a trick of fate, at his lowest, falls madly in love with Margarita. The film follows the novel in cutting into two different timelines, the trial of Yeshua Ha-Nazri from the perspective of Pilate, and Woland’s machinations in Moscow (with Woland played by August Diehl of Inglourious Basterds fame). By the end, the Master is condemned to a psychiatric hospital for dissidents, still writing his novel in secret – and the Faustian bargain is made by Margarita, who sells herself to the devil to free the Master.

The closest Bulgakov comes to divulging the Master’s name is in the mental asylum – spurned in life, “I no longer have a family name,” the Master says, yet in the epilogue Bulgakov grants the Master a designation: Number 118 of the First Ward. The common reading, of course, is that Bulgakov placed himself as the Master. But the truth is that Bulgakov wrote a piece of himself into every character. Like Pilate, Bulgakov’s personal sin is that of half-goodness – his cowardice during his war years, when his fellow soldiers in the White Army lynched a Jew and he didn’t attempt to intervene. Like Margarita, Bulgakov found himself falling madly into and out of love; like Woland, he wished that the hubris around him would get its comeuppance. Bulgakov even found himself in Homeless, the poet, who can only come to grips with reality through an injection in the psychiatric hospital. Czesław Miłosz imagined a similar thing with his “Murti-Bing” pill – take it and you can write in a Soviet dictatorship, for then you can resign yourself to socialist realism.

The magical scenes are ambiguous: Are they indeed happening or are they conjured up by a repressed writer’s imagination? At an outrageously sordid state banquet before his literary fall, the Master talks to a foreign consultant (whose business card is merely a W) about his interest in how the Soviet Union is the first society to eliminate God and preach atheism – “It has to change people somehow, don’t you think?” W asks. Is this the same Woland who poses this exact question at the Patriarch’s Pond? The same tension between reality and magic can be asked about Woland’s outlandish henchmen, whom the Master sees on his walks through Moscow. Are they merely apparitions unmoored in the Master’s mind, or are they a manifest evil that only he can see? No small matter, at least for those caught in their grasps. Even for a devil’s henchman, Azazello is quite terrifying, and Koroviev’s voice is even more annoying than in the novel (no one should speak in falsetto). Behemoth, a Tommy-gun-wielding tomcat with a penchant for Dostoyevsky and vodka, is a particular star.

Clever details from the novel are preserved in the movie. The repetition of the last line from a preceding chapter in Moscow at the start of the next Pilate chapter remains in the film, keeping the long influence of Pilate’s trial intact in the other plots. The dark magic of Woland – quite literally, as his theater séance convinces Moscow’s elite of fantastical scenes of a live headless man, conjured beautiful dresses, and fake money – seeps into Moscow, infecting it with an air of disbelief and magical realism. In contrast, there are no miracles in the trial of Pilate. It is completely real.

The political moments are powerful, albeit unsubtle. Some of Homeless’s new poetic outbursts in the film at the show trial are too reminiscent of today’s Russia – “Why do we need heaven? / We can go to Crimea!” and “A Soviet poet isn’t interested in Christ. / A Soviet poet is interested in a pump!” – to be anything but tragic. The theater that Woland and his henchmen interrupt is likewise a play set in 2022: “How many republics are there?” a character on stage asks. “All of them!” another answers before breaking out into a dance and a song, interrupted only by the devil. In other places the devil is now a functionary. “Manuscripts don’t burn,” Woland’s infamous retort to the Master to urge him to finish his burned novel, is now an indictment of the Master from an NKVD interrogator: it is not possible for key evidence to be destroyed. And it is also the NKVD, not merely Pilate at the trial, who asks, “What is truth?” The comparison between the two is intensified in the courtyard of a winter jail in Moscow, where the Master sees naked prisoners crucified.

To be clear, Bulgakov’s Yeshua differs from the Jesus of the New Testament. There are (almost) no reported miracles in the book (though in the movie, Yeshua heals Pilate’s headache); key facts are different, from the absence of Pilate’s wife to Yeshua only having one disciple instead of twelve. Where Jesus teaches that “no one is good but God alone” we have Yeshua’s message that every man is good, which causes Pilate such turmoil. In among the most moving scenes of Russian literature, a lonely Pilate dreams that he had not been a coward, a sin that Yeshua described as the “worst sin of all,” and in his dreams he lives in a world where he never sentenced Yeshua to death.

All of this comes full circle. The ultimate significance of The Master and Margarita is not just that “manuscripts don’t burn.” Rather, what makes The Master and Margarita so compelling is that it is the antithesis of another classic. Dostoyevsky, allowed to leave Russia, imagined from abroad in The Idiot, his favorite, imperfect novel, what would happen if a weak imitation of Christ one day entered a deeply hypocritical Russian society – as the title suggests, he would be regarded as a simpleton. Bulgakov – unable to emmigate, personally censored by Stalin, forbidden to publish his works – could only imagine the devil making his way to Moscow. And yet in this den of vipers, full of the same hypocritical Russians, Bulgakov sees good in every person.