‘…At odds with heaven and hell, the gods and mankind’. Woland and the Count of Monte Cristo

Abstract

Historians of literature have often studied M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita [Master i Margarita] in order to identify the sources that fuelled the author’s imagination. Considered in the context of a common European literary tradition of the 19th and 20th cc., Bulgakov’s oeuvre may reveal parallels with works of other European literatures. The article contains a comparative analysis of characters and plot lines in The Master and Margarita and The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel by A. Dumas (père), which reveals similarities in plot devices and character portrayals. Similar, too, is the period when the novel takes place — shortly after the shock of a revolution. The researcher suggests that both novels may have targeted a post-revolutionary society with ridicule and, at times, censure. The similarities between the two novels may stem from French romanticism’s enduring influence on Russian literature. At the same time, it is not impossible for the parallels with The Count of Monte Cristo to have been inspired, at least in part, by new Russian translations of Dumas’s novels in the 1920s — 1930s.