Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) wrote a fantastic satire about life in the Soviet Union that was never able to be published in his lifetime. THE MASTER AND MARGARITA was finally published in 1966 and the 150,000 copies were sold out within hours. Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the movies says that it is his favorite novel – “it’s just the greatest explosion of imagination, craziness, satire, humor, and heart.”
He wrote the novel because of his outrage at the portrayals of Christ in Soviet anti-religious propaganda. His method was to portray the reality of the eternal world through the intrusion of a stranger into Moscow – Satan. When typical atheists denied the existence of Jesus, Woland, the Satan character, scoffed and asserted that he was there when Jesus was crucified.
An author writes an account of the trial and death of Jesus with the main character being Pontius Pilate, who personifies cowardice, which Bulgakov maintains is the worst of vices. The prince of this world is the guarantor of the world of heaven and hell. They exist because he exists. In other words, the terror of evil, as seen in Stalin’s regime, and the banishment of God from society, witnesses to the reality of God.
Satan is the only truth-teller in Moscow, everyone else is false. Through a series of seances at the Variety Theater, Satan exposes the vanity, greed and servility that continues to rule in a communist culture. Bulgakov proposed that in a place like the USSR, justice was with the dark forces: the gospel according to the devil.
The novel deserves to be read, not only because it is unique, fascinating, funny and macabre, but also because it exposes the fallacy of secularism, of the God-deniers, the materialists who exercise their power in every society and generation. It reveals the literal reality of the supernatural, hell and judgment, the horror of the rejection of the Gospel and the reincarnation of people like Pontius Pilate in powerful figures of history.
It reminds me of the parable Jesus told: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possesions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks him and over powers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up the spoil…When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they goes in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first” (Luke 11:21-26). The saying is a warning of the dangers of getting rid of evil without filling the vacuum with good. Atheistic communism and secular materialism in general in rejecting Jesus are leaving themselves exposed to increased Satanic attack. It is a warning to us in the West when Jesus and God are rejected. “He who is not with me is against me.”
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, is available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2016, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
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