History As Hippodrome: The Apocalyptic Horse and Rider in The Master and Margarita

Abstract

With the possible exception of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, no other Russian novel published in recent memory has received more critical attention than Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. This is as it should be, for no other work of imaginative prose written in post-revolutionary Russia (and especially in the Stalinist thirties) has come to raise and to satisfy so many hermeneutical expectations. Yet its essence remains indeterminate; tied to both the nineteenth-century tradition of realism and fierce ethical commitment and to the twentieth-century tradition of post-symbolism and destabilizing irony, the novel seems a Gordian knot that refuses to be cut by any single-bladed approach. That Bulgakov managed to encode ingenious parodies of the Bible story and Goethe's Faust in his novel is by now a critical commonplace;1 that the fate of his hero and of his hero's manuscript is in many ways a fictionalization-even up to the point of that manuscript's secret vitality after its author's death-of Bulgakov's life with and through his novel has been corroborated by Marietta Chudakova's seminal research and commented on elsewhere as well.2 Thus, with its deep interest (k la Tolstoi