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Eilenden Proffer. early attempts to be a writer, plays within plays, plays within novels, works about writers, or their analogues




early attempts to be a writer, plays within plays, plays within novels, works about writers, or their analogues, creative scientists. Here in Bulgakov's last novel we have the writer's text itself, as separate from the surrounding narrative. The Pilate " novel" b revealed in many different ways and through different consciousnesses, as if it were an ur-text waiting to be discovered—but it is clearly the Master's work, and meant to be understood as such, judging by all of the internal indicators, no matter how it is presented. That the chapters are scattered throughout the larger narrative means that once again the reader is implicated. The reader's consciousness must provide the coherence between widely spaced sections, remembering details, and, most of all, wanting to know how this story, so familiar yet so new, will develop.

The only real characterization of the Master is to be found in his creation, a point generally overlooked. The Master as author does not appear to be interested in the fantastic, but rather the political and the psychological. The Master approaches the New Testament as literature rather than revelation, and proceeds to rewrite it in a way which makes better sense to him. The dialectic implicit in the contradictory world-views of Yeshua (" All men are good") and Pilate (" All men are bad, " with " including myself" understood) is never resolved. The tension between these points of view continues into the outer novel, as the two protagonists ascend the moon path, still arguing. Throughout this narrative the emphasis is on the fact that Yeshua is extraordinary only in his sensitivity and his naive belief in the goodness of man. It is a defenseless human being who is beaten and hung on the cross, not the Messiah. We know that the Master, like Woland, was a historian in his former life, and his novel certainly demonstrates this. The Master has taken what is normally perceived as religious material and given it a social context; his novel is not about Jesus Christ and His divinity as revealed by His time on earth, but about the unseen forces of politics and morality which lead to the death of a historically plausible figure—and the creation of the myth which will be the basis of a major world religion. If we try to comprehend the Master through his novel, we must conclude that he is essentially a pessimist. A case can be made, using only his text, that while wishing that Yeshua were right about humanity, he ultimately agrees with Pilate. In addition to the text of his novel, we have the Master's story of his love affair, a strange blend of ironic cliché and real emotion, and later, when things are going badly for him, he and Margarita appear to grow apart. We are given two other facts about the Master which are more important than they might at first seem: he can't remember his first wife's name, and he got his start as a writer by a remarkable turn of luck—he won the lottery. Fate—or Woland—provided him with the possibility of creating his novel, but he himself must rise to the challenge the critical reception poses. Unlike virtually everyone else in the novel, the Master guesses right away that Woland is the devil, but he nevertheless demonstrates little understanding of Woland's function, or of what is taking place. And what is taking place? A drama of identity, a recognition plot.

When the novel opens, we read the epigraph from Faust and we make at least two assumptions: first, that there will be something Faust-like in this novel; second, that the epigraph is meant seriously. As we read on, we are barraged by allusions to Faust, sometimes to the opera (which Bulgakov saw over forty times), sometimes to Goethe's poem, sometimes to the original sources. Bulgakov has gone to a lot of trouble to lead us to the conclusion that Woland's role is identical to that of Mephistopheles. By this time a fellow magician would know the main trick is being readied. These allusions are so distracting that we forget to ask: is Woland really Mephistopheles, is he really the embodiment of the force opposed to good? As the novel continues, we see that his role is quite dissimilar. We are comfortably superior to Ivan and Berlioz, as they fail to recognize the very literary figure who is telling them the story of Pontius Pilate, but



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