On Saturday, Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre premiered a new stage adaptation of “The Master and Margarita,” perhaps the most galvanizing and original Russian novel of the 20th Century. Written at the height of Stalinist oppression in the 1930s, the novel did not see the light of day until the middle 1960s, more than a decade after the death of Stalin.
Almost every aspect of the novel’s creation was a drama in its own right. The author, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), started out as a medical doctor in the countryside, then became a writer of comic stories and plays, wickedly making fun of the new Soviet regime in the 1920s. Although he masked his ideas somewhat, the censors soon caught on and started to suppress his work; the politically correct (for those Soviet days) critics had a field day stomping all over his work.
Bulgakov, as he felt the noose of political control tightening, took a risky step: He wrote directly to Stalin, acknowledging his absence of sympathy for communism (this alone could have brought about instant arrest) and requesting one of two alternatives. He wanted to be allowed to go to his belovedly imagined Paris, or else to work in the theater in Moscow. Stalin, mercifully, ordered the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre, under Konstantin Stanislavsky, to take Bulgakov in as a director.
Bulgakov and Stanislavsky did not work well together. They soon could not stand each other, and Bulgakov put his strongest creative effort into the writing of a new novel, which could, at least in some measure, express his many artistic and political frustrations. He worked on it for most of the 1930s and had almost finished by the time of his death in 1940.
The novel was “The Master and Margarita”; it combined a rewritten Gospel of St. Matthew, the Faust story as told by Goethe and a super-powerful, almost wacky satire of Soviet politics and society. To have shown this manuscript to anyone in Stalin’s day would have been suicide, so Bulgakov’s widow, Elena Sergeyevna, bravely kept it hidden. She obviously was the prototype for the lovely and courageous heroine of the novel, Margarita.
The story begins with a description of Moscow in the 1920s. Nothing works properly, and the few summer drinks available cause digestive trouble while they fail to cool a person down. A Soviet critic named Berlioz (Bulgakov loved that composer’s opera “The Damnation of Faust”) is laying down the Communist Party line to the writer of a new work about Jesus Christ: It must be proved that he never existed except in a few overheated imaginations.
The shrewd and cynical Berlioz is speaking heatedly, but patiently, to Ivan Bezdomny (“Ivan the Homeless”), a direct reference to Demian Bedny (who was called “Demian the Poor”), a cynical boot-licking writer for the Soviet regime who was anything but poor. Unlike Berlioz, Ivan is ardent, sincere and deeply ignorant, a perfect example of Bulgakov’s ideas about loyal Soviet literary people.
While Ivan drinks in Berlioz’s words with greater pleasure than he ingests the repulsive drinks, a strange person appears by the name of Woland.
Faust readers recognize him immediately as the Devil, but to Soviet eyes he appears a weird, unplaceable combination of a German intellectual and an Englishman, whose eyes change colors periodically. But the man speaks perfect Russian. In trying to work out the puzzle of Woland’s identity, the two Soviets find themselves in ironically compounded troubles caused by the Prince of Darkness. For Berlioz, to the author’s satisfacton, the result is mortal. For Ivan, the troubles with Woland open the way to enlightenment.
Bulgakov, with the help of Woland and a team of comically grotesque assistants-including Behemoth (the biblical beast), a cat with a bow tie and an accurate revolver, and Azazel (the biblical scapegoat), a worldly wise bringer of tidings-cuts a fantastic rip through the total fabric of Soviet society.
Ivan, driven to the brink of insanity and to a psychiatric hospital, meets the true literary and moral Master there. The Master has written an account of the Christian son of God, called by his Hebrew name of Yehoshua Ha-Notzri (“Jesus the Nazarite”). This rewritten Gospel seems to teach the lesson that the worst sin is cowardice.
The story takes another Faustian turn when we meet the beautiful and courageous Margarita, who shows to the Master and to the reader the existence of true love. She becomes connected to Woland and his gang in a wondrous way; she participates magically in his rites and routs, just as he had committed mayhem in a thinly disguised version of Stanislavsky’s theater and in the fine restaurant of the future Soviet Writers Union. Bulgakov exacts wondrous revenge, in his fantasy, on all who hurt him.
In the end, Margarita receives her reward from Woland, the Devil, who in Bulgakov’s quote from Goethe, is “Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” Moscow finds itself shaken by the results of devilish activity, and the characters from Yehoshua’s life receive their ascension by the light of the moon.
Elena Sergeyevna waited until after Stalin’s death before she sought publication of “The Master and Margarita.” In 1966-67, a bowdlerized version came out in a Soviet literary magazine, and even this incomplete version shook the Soviet Union and the entire reading world. Bulgakov’s tale of oppression and satanic resistance, comic derision and witchlike revenge and-above all-the incredibly redeeming power of pure and selfless love conquered the human heart as few works have in our cruel century of mass murder and political hypocrisy.
Bulgakov became practically a cult figure among the Russians, but this was partly a result of another person’s work. In the 1960s, when the Moscow Art Theatre had become a musty relic of its former glory days under Stanislavsky, another theater grew up in Moscow’s rich thespian life. The Taganka, under director Yuri Liubimov, presented a series of plays that were cheeky and deviant by Soviet standards. Liubimov enjoyed some protection by the KGB because he had persuaded the son of the KGB head, Yuri Andropov, to leave the theater, as the father desired.
Liubimov decided to work out a stage version of “The Master and Margarita,” and he touched a vital nerve in the Soviet body politic. All of his clever and inventive stagecraft went into a fabulous performance to which all of Moscow wanted to come. One can get a Chicago Bulls ticket more easily than you could get into those performances. The night I attended, the theater square was so crowded that my Russian friends had to propel me forcefully into the theater. When I saw the performance, I saw an audience transfigured.
At the end of the play, the actors walked round and round several enlarged photos of Bulgakov, and the audience rose in roaring tribute.
Moscow’s sense of its intellectual integrity, maintained against such terrible odds in an oppressive state, made itself triumphantly felt. Tears flowed in abundance-tears of mourning and tears of reconciliation and joy.
Bulgakov and his novel, together with Liubimov’s art of direction and performance, became a symbol of Russia’s throbbing intellectual pulse. While there were unsettled arguments of literary interpretation, which rage on to this day, everyone saw Bulgakov as an expression of the 20th Century Russian mind at its very best. Simply to show the book or mention the name showed on which side of the fence you stood.
Several American theatrical companies have undertaken productions of this difficult and moving piece. It will be thought-provoking to see how a creative Chicago environment deals with this classic of 20th Century Russian artistic expression.
Chicago, which has its own rich theatrical traditions, could give a marvelous creative twist-and forward shove-to the great force that is “The Master and Margarita.”
The city of “the Big Shoulders” and the flooded underground tunnels is by no means alien to the Russian and Slavic experience.
The shouting, hustling aldermen might well come together artistically and theatrically with the spirit of the brawling and canny satanic operatives in Moscow, so lovingly and colorfully brought to life in “The Master and Margarita.”
