The four component parts of “The Master and Margarita” and their literary sources

On the eve of the day when the dead and other unclean spirits run riot, one cannot but recall the work of Russian literature that is held to be mysterious, full of otherworldly signs and horror, and is invariably linked with mystical signs.

Although, on the whole, The Master and Margarita is rather about people who have got stuck in some other time. Or perhaps it is the novel itself that has got stuck in the wrong time? In the Silver Age, for instance. Otherwise it would be hard to make out what the author meant to say.

Few here, of course, remember how the magazine version of the novel appeared in the journal Moskva. Even then the impression arose that the author was a great fantasist and knew how to write originally. But look closer, and that is not quite the truth.

In essence, the text grew out of a competition for the best work about the devil, in which a good many capable people took part, Kuzmin and Remizov among them. All the more so since, strictly speaking, the author of this novel, so to say, did not write it, for he had died. He died and had no time either to finish it or to arrange the chapters and separate pieces. That work was done by his widow.

Which, if one thinks about it, explains why the novel seems to fall apart into four parts. The first is the demonology of the Silver Age. The second is the literature of the 1920s, supplying the love line. For example, Kamensky’s story “Summer” about an engineer’s wife who receives guests naked, that is, in nothing but her knickers. And finally there is one more part of the novel, the story of Yeshua, which is of course the typical drama of Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, The King of the Jews, which was staged with magnificent sets. The last part of the novel is a not very cheerful satire, sending us back to the newspaper Gudok, where all the phantoms of this “Bulgakovism” worked: Ilf, Petrov, Olesha, Kataev and Bulgakov himself. But this line has no value in the novel; the author never finished it.

For some reason many failed to see this, and took the novel for a new Gospel altogether, which it of course never claimed to be.