Master and Margarita: a Literary Autobiography?

Abstract

The dialectics of a triad—the author, his creation, and the surrounding reality—is the focus of this essay, which aims to discover how much of his soul Mikhail Bulgakov put into his famous opus, Master and Margarita. The author's mind becomes a bifurcation point between his work and reality, a kind of Borgesian Aleph, where causality might change direction and where the border between the Kantian 'thing in itself' and phenomena disappears. Though Stalin was keenly interested in Bulgakov's work, the latter's attempt to play Seneca's role near Emperor Nero was mercilessly crushed. Still, one of the writer's prophecies regarding the Jewish fate, symbolised in the novel by a Yom Kippur rooster, very nearly came true 13 years after his death. TO THE FRIENDS OF MY YOUTH IN DONETSK The Middle Ages are dear to us because they possessed in a high degree the feeling of edges and separation. They neuer mixed different plans and looked at the supernatural with great moderation. A noble mixture of thoughfulness and mysticism brings us close to that epoch and calls us to gain strength from the works written c. 1200} O. Mandelstam (1891-1938) Sleeplessness. At daum I start looking at the ceiling and straining my eyes until the time when, behind the mndows, life starts its routine: cap, kerchief, kerchief, cap. How boring! M. A. Bulgakov (1891-1940) Every European is a miter, potentially or in fact.3 J. L. Borges (1899-1986) At The end of 1938, in Buenos Aires, the 39-year-old avant garde poet, Jorge Luis Borges, was ill with a dangerous infection. While recovering from a difficult operation that saved his life, Borges decided to check his sanity by Literature & Theology © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org > The Author 2006. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:37:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms