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Reaching a Reader: The Master's Audience in The Master and Margarita

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Carol Avins
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Extract

At the end of Dr. Zhivago, Zhivago's old friends sit overlooking Moscow and read together a collection of his writings, compiled through the efforts of his devoted and somewhat mysterious half-brother. For all the dark times depicted in the novel, it ends with a dual affirmation of the power of art and of the spirit to survive. Zhivago's writings endure not only by virtue of having been created and not only in the minds of those who know them, but on paper as well. In this respect Boris Pasternak's novel offers an intriguing contrast to one completed in a bleaker period, The Master and Margarita. In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel the problem of preserving the protagonist's writing and conveying it to readers is neither as simple nor as successfully resolved, despite intervention of a more mysterious, even supernatural, sort.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , Summer 1986 , pp. 272 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1986

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References

1. Discussion of the writer-reader relationship encompassed many interrelated questions, amongthem the following: the types of writers to be given access to the public, the proscribed and prescribed features of a literary work, the reading public's makeup and nature, the writer's potential for influencinga reader, and whether the reader played an active or passive role. The journals of the 1920s and 1930s are full of these debates, and their volume and import confirm Boris M. Eikhenbaum's point that in the postrevolutionary years, the question of “how to write” had been overshadowed and complicated by that of “how to be a writer.” See his “Literaturnyi byt,” Moi vremennik: slovestnost', nauka, kritika, smes’ (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei v Leningrade, 1929; facsimile rpt., Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1962), p. 51.

2. Concluding remarks of Gor'kii, A. M., Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s “ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934 Google Scholar; facsimile rpt., Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1978). The first two phrases quoted appear on p. 676, the closing lineson p. 681.

3. Speech of B.L. Pasternak, Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s “ezd, p. 549.

4. Jakobson, Roman, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Selected Writings, ed. Rudy, Stephen (6 vols.;The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 3: 21–22 Google Scholar.

5. Benjamin, Walter, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York: Schocken, 1969, p. 87 Google Scholar.

6. Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979, p. 87 Google Scholar.

7. Georgii Vladimov, “Literature Must Not Be Controlled” (Letter to the board of the USSR Writers’ Union, 10 October 1977), The Samizdat Bulletin, no. 56 (December 1977): 2; originallypublished in Posev, no. 11 (November 1977).

8. Both this episode and that describing the publication of an excerpt, which are missing fromEnglish translations of the novel, are included in the 1973 Russian edition: Bulgakov, Mikhail, Belaia gvardiia. Teatral'nyi roman. Master i Margarita (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973, pp. 560–561 Google Scholar. Further citations, given parenthetically in the text, are to this source.

9. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “O sobesednike,” Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Struve, G. P. and Filippov, B. A. (3 vols.; Washington, D.C.: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1966–1969), 2: 282 Google Scholar.

10. The terms are Clark's, Katerina, in The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 167–176 Google Scholar, passim. In placing The Master and Margarita against Clark's model of the prototypical plot of the socialist realist novel, one sees not only the distance betweenBulgakov's novel and others of its time but also the patterns they have in common: a focus on themaster-disciple relationship and on the movement from darkness to enlightenment, from failure totranscendence. I am not suggesting that Bulgakov had the socialist realist model in mind: theseconcerns, of course, have ancient sources, including the Bible, which is obviously of great importanceto the novel.

11. Bakhtin, M. M., “K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk,” Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, comp. Bocharov, S. G. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979, pp. 356–366 Google Scholar.

12. Clark in The Soviet Novel, p. 159, discussing the “radical reconception of the role of thewriter” in the 1930s, states that the writer “was no longer the creator of original texts; he becamethe teller of tales already prefigured in Party lore. “

13. “The Storyteller,” p. 91.

14. Wolfgang, Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History 3 (Winter 1972): 299.Google Scholar

15. The Role of the Reader, p. 215.

16. As Boris Gasparov notes in “Iz nabliudenii nad motivnoi strukturoi romana Bulgakova, M. A. ‘Master i Margarita',” Slavica Hierosolymitana 3 (1978): 209 Google Scholar, this ironic description of Ivan recallsIeshua's characterization of his own audience: “These good people,” he explains to Pilate, “… havelearned nothing and have muddled everything I said” (p. 439). The audiences of both leshua andthe Master are inadequate interpreters.

17. The Master and the narrator, it should be noted, also utter this appeal to the gods—theMaster after his manuscript is restored (p. 703) and the narrator in chapter 5 (p. 477) and in theopening of chapter 32 (p. 749).

18. “O sobesednike,” p. 280.

19. The line “Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli” is in Terentianus Maurus's De litteris syllabis et metris Horatii (late 2nd c. A.D.).