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Ellendea Proffer




character Shigalyov in Dosloyevsky's The Possessed: a state in which society is controlled through spies and denunciations. Many artists in Russia at this time wanted to continue the themes (but not necessarily the forms) of die classical Russian cultural tradition, but in the politically polarized Soviet society of the 1920s choosing the wrong theme could be dangerous to your career, in the 1930s, it was dangerous to your life. The very nature of the concept of The Master and Margarita marks Bulgakov as a risk-taker of the first order. Characteristically, his response to this fear-struck era was a mullifacetedjoke.

The atmosphere of terror deepened all through the years Bulgakov was working on what he referred to as his " sunset" novel. Friends and acquaintances were arrested and exiled. Many writers gave up during this period, switching to translation or children's literature, not even daring to write for the drawer. But unlike the Master, Bulgakov continued to work on a novel which had no hope of being published in his lifetime—although like others, he sometimes lulled himself with the idea that soon the terror would run out of steam, soon things would change. More to the point, this novel could easily have gotten him arrested, as could the fact that he socialized with American diplomats. The knowledge that Stalin had liked his play The Days of the Turbins might have provided a kind of protection at first since the secret police tried not to dispose of people the leader might one day inquire about. But after Mandel-stam's first arrest in 1934 Bulgakov could have had no illusions about safety. In the early 1930s even those who should have known better sought logical meaning in these arrests, and speculated about the " cause* of a given arrest. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet Anna Akhmatova (whom Bulgakov knew and liked), very early on countered these questions by saying " What for? What do you mean, what fort It's time you understood that people are arrested for nothing! " Bulgakov, like Akhmatova, had his ear to the ground, he knew what form the social architecture was taking before it was completed, and as a man who actually had fought against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, he knew what danger he»vas in. So why did he continue? Perhaps in order not to be like the Master, a character who represented his own worst side, the side which dominated when Bulgakov had a series of what we would call nervous breakdowns, during which he was afraid to go out on the street, and during which he could not work. His letters and conversations quoted in memoirs suggest that he considered himself weak in every area but his work. Others would not have agreed with him: they saw a witty man who joked until the end, a brilliant mimic and storyteller, who summoned the last of his energies to finish work few could have imagined would ever be published. Bulgakov was determined to accomplish what he felt his fate required of him. This sense of destiny often provoked humor from fellow writers who thought Bulgakov took himself too seriously. He was tense and prickly, quick to see an affront to his honor in the way in which a theater would deal with his text, for example. But when one examines just how difficult it was for him to become a writer in a time actively hostile to people of his political background, this seriousness becomes understandable. The early years in Moscow were especially difficult, as this quote from a diary entry of 1923 demonstrates:

David, who is always singing psalms (in Fenimore Cooper's The Ijtst of the Mohirans], led me to think of Cod. Perhaps the strong and the daring don't need Him, but for people like me life is easier with the thought of Him. My illness has developed complications and is protracted. I am in very low spirits. Illness may prevent me from working, which is why I am afraid of it, which is why I hope in God.



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