Berlioz, editor of a highbrow literary magazine, and the poet Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov, ‘who wrote under the pseudonym of Bezdomny’. Before they have had a chance even to exchange pleasantries, a third character materialises:
‘Just then the sultry air coagulated and wove itself into the shape of a man – a transparent man of the strangest appearance. On his small head was a jockey-cap and he wore a short check bum-freezer made of air. The man was seven feet tall but narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin and with a face made for derision.’
It seems this character, ‘swaying from left to right … without touching the ground’, is the Devil. But no sooner has He manifested himself, than the Devil vanishes. Shortly thereafter, Berlioz and Bezdomny are joined by a ‘professor’, a foreigner, country of origin unclear. The three of them have a rambling, opaque conversation. At the end of the first chapter, the action suddenly shifts to Rome at the time of Christ, and the palace of Pontius Pilate. What?
I cannot really fathom it. But the sheer novelty of reading a book of this sort after such a long lay-off is reward in itself. I am doing something difficult – good for me.
‘Your head will be cut off!’ the foreigner informs Berlioz in the course of their baffling chat, ‘by a Russian woman, a member of the Komsomol.’ (I have no idea what the Komsomol is.) After the mysterious detour to Rome in Chapter 2, back at Patriarch’s Ponds the editor and poet decide this ‘professor’ is certifiably crazy – ‘his green left eye was completely mad, his right eye, black, expressionless and dead’. Leaving Bezdomny to watch over this lunatic, Berlioz runs to telephone the authorities. (‘The professor, cupping his hands into a trumpet, shouted: “Wouldn’t you like me to send a telegram to your uncle in Kiev?” Another shock – how did this madman know that he had an uncle in Kiev?’)
Then this happens:
‘Berlioz ran to the turnstile and pushed it. Having passed through he was just about to step off the pavement and cross the tramlines when a white and red light flashed in his face and the pedestrian signal lit up with the words “Stop! Tramway!” A tram rolled into view, rocking slightly along the newly-laid track that ran down Yermolayevsky Street and into Bronnaya. As it turned to join the main line it suddenly switched its inside lights on, hooted and accelerated.
Although he was standing in safety, the cautious Berlioz decided to retreat behind the railings. He put his hand on the turnstile and took a step backwards. He missed his grip and his foot slipped on the cobbles as inexorably as though on ice. As it slid towards the tramlines his other leg gave way and Berlioz was thrown across the track. Grabbing wildly, Berlioz fell prone. He struck his head violently on the cobblestones and the gilded moon flashed hazily across his vision. He just had time to turn on his back, drawing his legs up to his stomach with a frenzied movement and as he turned over he saw the woman tram-driver’s face, white with horror above her red necktie, as she bore down on him with irresistible force and speed. Berlioz made no sound, but all around him the streets rang with the desperate shrieks of women’s voices. The driver grabbed the electric brake, the car pitched forward, jumped the rails and with a tinkling crash the glass broke in all its windows. At this moment Berlioz heard a despairing voice: “Oh, no …!” Once more and for the last time the moon flashed before his eyes but it split into fragments and then went black.
Berlioz vanished from sight under the tramcar and a round, dark object rolled across the cobbles, over the kerbstone and bounced along the pavement.
It was a severed head.’
Google tells me the Komsomol was the popular name for the youth wing of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and not the Moscow municipal tram network. But it’s academic: I’m in.
Right here is where my life changes direction. This is the moment I resolve to finish this book – a severed head bouncing across the cobblestones. Life must be held at bay, just for a few days, if for no reason other than to prove it can be done. I need to know what happens next.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891 and died in Moscow in 1940 and at no point in-between, as far as I can establish, did he ever visit Broadstairs – never toured the Dickens Museum on a drizzly afternoon, never ordered a milkshake at Morelli’s. But let’s pretend he did. Imagine he manifested himself in the Albion Bookshop on Albion Street and discovered, as I had done, a copy of something called The Master and Margarita, with his name on the spine and cover. For a number of reasons, he would be astonished.
Macтep и Mapгapитa, usually translated as The Master and Margarita, was unpublished at the time of Bulgakov’s death – unpublished and, in one sense, unpublishable. For many years, it was available only as samizdat (written down and circulated in secret); to be found in possession of a copy was to risk imprisonment. Even its first official appearance in the journal Moskva in 1966 was censored; the first complete version was not published until 1973. Yet here it is in Broadstairs, available to purchase and in English to boot. ‘Бoжe мoй!’fn6
fn6. ‘Good Heavens!’
Another reason Bulgakov might be astounded to find his novel, in English, in a small Kent bookshop, might stagger out onto the pavement to catch his breath and, with a trembling hand, light a cigarette – ‘Я нyждaюcь в дымe!’fn7 – is that back when he died, the book remained unfinished. The first draft was tossed into a stove in 1930, after Bulgakov learned that his play, Cabal of Sanctimonious Hypocrites, had been banned by the Soviet authorities (who, unsurprisingly, did not care for the title). After five years’ work, he abandoned a second draft in 1936. He commenced a third draft the same year and chiselled away at it, making corrections and additions, until April 1940, when illness forced him to abandon his labours. A few weeks later, Bulgakov expired, exasperated. Macтep и Mapгapитa was completed by his widow, Elena Sergeevna; and it was she who spent the next twenty-five years trying to get it published. (‘Eлeнa, мoя любoвь, ecть кoe-чтo, чтo мы дoлжны oбcyдить …’fn8)
fn7. ‘I need a smoke!’
fn8. ‘Elena, my love, there is something we need to discuss …’
Have you read The Master and Margarita? It cannot be denied that the early part of the book is often inscrutable, a barrage of in-jokes savaging institutions and individuals of the early Soviet era which only an antique Muscovite or an authority on early twentieth-century Russian history would recognise or find amusing. And then there is the business with Rome and Pontius Pilate. Essentially, it is a book one has to stick with and trust.
Here are the bare bones of the plot. The Devil lands in Moscow, disguised as a magician. With Him is an infernal entourage: a witch, a valet, a violent henchman with a single protruding fang, and an enormous talking cat called Behemoth, a tabby as big as a tiger. The diabolic gang leave a trail of panic and destruction across the literary and governmental Moscow landscape. Sometimes this is grotesquely amusing, at others terrifying; frequently it is both. In a lunatic asylum we are introduced to the master, a disillusioned author whose novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate (ah, I see!) has been rejected for seemingly petty reasons. His response has been to burn the manuscript and shut out the world, even turning away his lover, Margarita, who ardently believes in his work.
Of course, I only appreciated the autobiographical significance of this in retrospect and the communistic targets of the satire remained obscure to me. In terms of the story itself, the promise of the severed head was slow to be realised. Had it not been for the half-forgotten kick of reading a book at all, I probably would not have carried on; for the first couple of days, I was compelled to do so by little more than my own stubbornness. This is only a book; I like reading books; this one will not get the better of me. But the more I read, the more I understood – or rather, understood that I did not need to understand. If I let it, the book would carry me instead.
The Master and Margarita begins as a waking nightmare. It has the relentlessness of a nightmare, the same persistent illogic one finds in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but nastier, crueller – dead eyes, derision, severed heads, a cat whose mischievous grin betokens only black magic.