Afterword 369

He was over thirty before his career really began, he was in constant ill-health, and was a hypochondriac as well. Only now, thanks to the diary entries, do we know that shell-shock played a role in his nervous condition—although some would consider the arrests proceeding all around him as the 1930s wore on reason enough. He appears to have always had fears that he would die early, as his father had. There is a sense in his letters of time running out, of trying to accomplish his main work—even when he was not quite sure of what it was. Of course when he identified in himself the symptoms of the kidney disease his father had died of, few took him seriously. But it was these symptoms which made him determined to finish the novel he considered his main work.

Fate, for Bulgakov, is a central mystery which cannot be penetrated by the human mind, only submitted to, as one gradually begins to sense its form. Yeshua blames no one for his death, he accepts his fate; Berlioz does not, but it comes to him anyway. In the play Moliè re, a work that explores many of the same themes as The Mailer and Margarita, we sec a writer destroyed by both his society and his own character flaws. At the end of the play, the chronicler of Moliè re's troupe writes in his register and asks himself what was the cause of Moliè re's death, and answers: The cause was fate." This line was censored in Soviet lexis, fate being one of those things which scientific systems of organizing humanity prefer to ignore.

In Anglo-American literary studies we refer to " the anxiety of influence"; in totalitarian Russia the appropriate phrase would have been " the anxiety of destruction." All of Bulgakov's literary energy and creative will were concentrated on proving something that his environment contradicted: that manuscripts don't burn, that art outlasts the tyrants, that entropy doesn't triumph over the creative spirit. In the view of some of his friends this was touching naivete, not unlike Yeshua's, or perhaps it was a kind of cosmic whistling in the dark.

But not everyone saw this belief as quixotic. In 1935 at a private literary gathering, Boris Pasternak said he wanted to drink to Bulgakov. The hostess protested that the first toast should be to the respected older writer, V. V. Veresaev. " No, " said Pasternak, " I want to drink to Bulgakov. Veresaev is a great man, of course, but he is a lawful phenomenon, while Bulgakov is an unlawful one."

Who at that party in 1935 would ever have believed that from the late 1960s through the 1990s Bulgakov's works would be translated around the world that he never got to see, that his plays would be made into movies, that there would be a cult surrounding him and his works in Russia, that his old house in Kiev would become a museum, that he would be more popular than Gorky? Not Pasternak—not anyone.

Bulgakov's novel reached its audience twenty-six years after his death. Only now do we have some insight into how that work began, thanks to the diary fragments published in 1990, fifty years after that death. A diary entry of January 1925 finds the writer visiting the editorial office of the magazine The Atheist. He bought most of the 1924 issues, went home to look through them, and wrote down his amazed reactions:

... I was stunned. Not by the blasphemy, although it is boundless, but that is merely a superficial aspect. The essence of the matter lies in an idea which ran be proved by citing the actual documents: Jesus Christ is depicted as a swindler and a scoundrel, and the attack is focused on him. It is not difficult to see whose work this is. This is a crime like no other.

The fantastic nature of The Master and Margarita itself is Bulgakov's answer to his era's denial of imagination and its wish to strip the world of divine qualities. Fittingly, it was his own final act of magic.