Magical Subversions: The Master and Margarita in Performance

Abstract

Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is informed by a number of familiar modem conceits of magic. The novel includes social-political nuances reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Mario and the mountain, ethnographic and mythological ones appropriate to Garcia-Marquez's and Carpentier's realismo magico, and meta-literary elements which appear in Tzvetan Todorov's study of the fantastic. Out of this broad range of meanings, two in particular are of interest to Bulgakov. The first is the modem literary condition in which, as noted by Todorov (following Sartrel, "the fantastic becomes the rule, not the exception." In the texts of Gogol and Kafka, we have come to appreciate, the traditional hesitation authors create for readers between "reality" and the supernatural is absent. Instead of even vaguely possible explanations we are offered fictions in which noses jump off faces and protagonists become insects as a matter of course (without benefit, moreover, of the saving explanation that could be provided by allegory). The Master and Margarita, it seems to me, follows a similar pattern in making magic and the supernatural not titillating possibility but the rules of the literary game itself. The second sense of magic important for Bulgakov is its primary theatrical mode. Woland is the leader of a talented group of actors, indeed of a superb vaudeville troupe complete with trained cat, and it is their supernatural talents and powers of persuasion which act as narrative catalysts and create the fictional rules at issue.