In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!

–Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Written during the height of Stalinist oppression, Mikhail Bulgakov’s beloved classic The Master and Margarita is a modern fairytale whose fantastical characters mockingly poke at the armored underbelly of Soviet society. Multiple interwoven plotlines leap from Biblical Jerusalem to 1930s Moscow (with a day trip to Yalta), weaving together tragic themes and biting social commentary with undeniable humor. From the novel’s curious plot details to its numerous revisions, burials, and resurrections to questions surrounding the authenticity of the text itself, Master and Margarita’s many uncertainties produce a translucent narrative through which certain things are revealed and others concealed by the reader’s own experience, with each landing on a slightly different interpretation. Yet scurrying down the Moscow streets after the novel’s larger-than-life personalities and Bulgakov’s jaunty narration, the casual reader might overlook the significance of a simple yet stubborn fact that is impossible to ignore: the Devil himself is sauntering through a city of atheists, and no one seems to notice. But even if we throw up our hands and grant Bulgakov this absurdity, the question remains: who are Woland and his company of devils, and how are we to interpret them? If Woland is truly Satan, as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny, he cannot be the principle of evil itself. He is a Satan framed not by Pandemonium and legions of winged angels but by a seven-foot-tall apparition in a pince-nez and an oversized cat. Instead, Bulgakov’s merry company carries a flavor of Gogol’s folkloric devilry—naughty tales of centuries past totally out of place in the new social order. One answer for their visit to Moscow, where Bulgakov himself winks at the reader like the blacksmith who catches the devil by the tail, is that Woland & Co. represent the spirit of rebellion. In this way, the novel itself becomes a medium through which seen and unseen forces of nature and the spiritual world rebel against the forces that sought to bring it into order: on the first level, the atheist Soviet state through the Moscow plot, and on the second level, dogmatic Christianity through the Jerusalem plot (which angle is beyond the scope of this paper). Violently rejecting their suppression, sacred and eternal forces return to a disbelieving world and turn it upside down until that world can no longer deny their existence.

The Master and Margarita opens with a casual conversation between Berlioz (the chairman of a state-sanctioned literary association), the poet Homeless, and the Devil regarding the existence of Jesus Christ. The interlocutors’ disagreement is on the basis of facts: the well-educated Party man is quite sure Christ never existed, the Devil is quite sure that he did, and Homeless isn’t quite sure of anything. Needless to say, Berlioz also holds firmly to the assurance that there is no such thing as the Devil. The absurdity of this scene rests on the incredible ability to vehemently deny something right in front of you in order to comply with an imposed belief system (something loyal Party members were especially good at). Bulgakov’s comic success at playing with facts, here and throughout the novel, is only possible in a world where facts themselves take on a sacred quality. To understand how this came about, we must begin by examining the development of utilitarianism and its sweeping influence on society. Most closely associated with the philosopher John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, utilitarianism is a school of thought that conceives of the universal good as seeking to maximize happiness and minimize suffering for the greatest number of people. Collective pleasure is the ultimate aim, rather than virtue, honor, or holiness, as in other systems. In order to achieve this, utilitarians must identify what is useful for achieving this end (maximum happiness) on a societal level and either eliminate or reform what is not, ideally improving the social and material conditions of a population through rational means.

However, utilitarian thinkers face a persistent objection to the loss of individuality implied by a strongly egalitarian attitude: Julia Driver paraphrases the utilitarian maxim, “One person’s good counts for no more than anyone else’s good.” In addition, a strict focus on what is quantifiable, factual, and expedient for societal progress may result in the loss of precious cultural traditions, a very real but entirely unquantifiable aspect of human experience. Utilitarians were keen on eliminating the superfluous, and appeals to tradition or natural order seemed far-fetched in an increasingly rationalized world (Driver). A reforming attitude of this sort enjoyed a special stronghold on Britain during the Victorian period, and while these social reforms may have done good, they were not without their critics. Charles Darwin, perhaps the most authoritative voice of natural scientific reason during this period, himself regretted in “Atrophy of Imagination in a Scientist” that an obsession with facts, figures, and “useful” knowledge had left him unable to enjoy music or poetry; in his own words, “the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature” (quoted in Dickens 311). Prominent writers and social critics, including Charles Dickens, also began to point out the damaging effects posed to children by a strictly utilitarian upbringing where education was limited to practical instruction, and fairy tales—“graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond” (Dickens 151)—were considered detrimental to children’s development. Figures like Darwin and Dickens present the case that seemingly frivolous activities like imaginative play and storytelling are actually essential for raising a happy, compassionate, and well-adjusted population, issuing cautionary tales of children raised in a world devoid of enchantment.

By the twentieth century, obsession with facts, data, and quantitative information had advanced to such a degree that new sciences had to be invented to rationalize the rationalization of the world. In his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” sociologist Max Weber comments on both the affordances and the challenges of an increasingly factualized society, borrowing Schiller’s term to discuss what he famously calls the disenchantment of the world. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Weber recounts that science and technology had advanced to such a degree that the sacred spiritual and religious beliefs of old had lost their stronghold on the mind. The pre-rational, “unenlightened” man’s fate may have been determined by the stars or the gods, but in the decades following the Enlightenment, this mystical relationship between human life and the mysterious, incalculable forces that govern it had all but disappeared, at least from the intellectual sphere. Weber writes directly, “Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. With such progress in medicine and the natural sciences, there is no longer a need to turn to the spiritual world” (6). Rather than tradition, religion, or superstition, it was science, developing at an unprecedented rate, that held answers. The prevailing scientific theories had also, by this time, produced a new sacred axiom: “(Rationalism) means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (Weber 1). This is perhaps the defining belief of modern life: all knowledge is accessible given the right tools. 

However, it can be argued that when taken to an extreme, rationalizing the spiritual world out of existence actually leads to the opposite of the intended outcome, a sort of “reenchantment.” Writing in 1949, Carl Jung describes this phenomenon with the Greek word enantiodromia, explaining, “In the philosophy of Heraclitus it [enantiodromia] is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events—the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite” (Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences). This is because the evolution of society has outpaced the evolution of the psyche; in other words, society has changed but humans’ instinctual needs have not. Weber writes, “As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo… so do we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity” (6). Existing sources of spiritual guidance have been disproven, but the desire remains. Where premodern man might have found rhythm and meaning in the rituals surrounding birth, life, and death, seeking guidance from the spiritual world, modern man—by freeing himself from ritual and superstition—is left unprepared to face these circumstances of finite human existence. In fact, drawing from the ideas of Tolstoy, Weber goes so far as to speculate that death itself loses its meaning in a disenchanted world (1-2). And the new source of answers to eternal questions, the specialized fields of study to which educated people now devoted their intellectual energy, produced insights that were almost entirely incomprehensible to those of other fields. With only specialized ways of knowing things in an increasingly technical world, commonly-held human beliefs begin to erode, eventually falling away entirely as relics of the past. “Reenchantment” picks up at this moment, proposing a dialectical relationship between the natural world and supernatural belief that occurs as a result of overrationalization. Simply put, the greater the suppression of the spiritual world, the greater its effect will be on the people that have rejected it. The same process of disenchantment that was meant to master superstition actually leaves the modern mind itself mastered by even greater superstition, and we find ourselves back in a world of gods and demons. They simply have different names. 

Although he writes from a totally different point of view than that of Dickens, Darwin, or Weber, The Master and Margarita is Bulgakov’s answer to disenchantment and a society whose religion was atheism, where total utilitarianism and a culture of disenchantment was strictly enforced. But where the disenchanted world proposes to free humanity from superstition through the power of reason, it in its turn creates victims of ignorance. In Bulgakov’s imagination, the world of spirits takes advantage of this precarity, exacting revenge in a fit of carnivalesque revelry: Peeping Toms turn into hogs, witches fly on broomsticks, and it becomes necessary to keep careful track of one’s head. But all this mischief unfolds against a much darker backdrop, where the ancient olive groves and temple walls of the mind have been torn down and replaced with concrete and interrogation cells. The Soviet regime itself produces new quasi-spiritual forces—how else could it be that, in a scientifically demystified world, people are disappearing without a trace? Put out of a job, Woland and his forces erupt against the indignity of erasure. Throughout his antics and especially in his explosive show of “black magic,” the epitome of the spirit of carnival (Bulgakov 116-29), Woland exposes the man-made world as one of illusions and reminds the Soviet citizenry that they have not so much control over their own fate as they think. 

The undeniable parallel between Woland and his retinue and the Devil as he is portrayed in Gogol’s folk tales calls to mind the image of the trickster, an ancient archetypal figure Carl Jung describes in this way: “In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in sacred and magical rites, in man's religious fears and exaltations, this phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulated guise” (200). Incessant suppression of the spiritual world is met with an eternal paradox: an attempt to master nature that ends up making the one who masters a victim of the same forces. The trickster has returned to terrorize those who would deny his existence. Although Berlioz greets Woland with this assertion—“The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in fairy tales about God” (Bulgakov 8), and, by extension, the Devil—this is easier said than done. The minds of the Russian people, with their rich storytelling tradition, are too steeped in tales to fully surrender the fairies, sprites, and witches who raised them: “One simply cannot shake off the memory image of things as they were, and drags it along like a senseless appendage” (Jung 200). In fact, the citizens of Moscow are constantly calling upon the Devil. “Devil take it” remains a favorite expression, and the Muscovites are quick to blame a supposedly nonexistent entity when things go wrong. Jung addresses this phenomenon directly when he writes, “The trickster motif does not crop up only in its original form but appears just as naïvely and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man—whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying 'accidents' which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent” (201-02), and later, “The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched” (206). The irony of this case, of course, is that it is really the Devil who is the cause of their misery.

Beyond a cheeky satisfaction in seeing corrupt officials get what they deserve, the desire to return to the earth that the spiritual forces embody is a subtle but powerful theme in Bulgakov’s work. It is notable that the presence of the supernatural in his cold, gray world really only terrorizes a certain type of person: the Party man. Women like Margarita, who does not show her face until nearly halfway through the novel, actually find a sort of solidarity (if not comfort) in these chaotic and untamed beings. When Margarita accepts the gift of Azazello’s cream, she is granted a totally feminine nature of beauty, vitality, and freedom—an experience far from torturous. Instead, ten years of stress and anxiety disappear: her eyebrows grow thick, her hair grows long and curly, her wrinkles disappear, and her skin glows with the bloom of health and lushness so long denied to her (Bulgakov 239). She sheds her clothes and the restraint of Soviet scarcity and egalitarianism that had robbed her of her femininity. By becoming a witch, Margarita shares in the rebellion of the spiritual world against the material, the organic against the manufactured, and the instinctual against the imposed, and melts into the symbol of nature in a world where there is only material causation. Soaring above Moscow on her broomstick, she unleashes her anger on the critic Latunsky to avenge her lover before flying straight into nature, where “the charms and secrets of the earth on a moonlit night revealed themselves” (Bulgakov 241). Far from the dull glint of the city streets, the earth receives Margarita as a fairy queen: she bathes in a river and feels the soft grass between her toes, serenaded by a chorus of frogs playing a march on wooden pipes as naiads dance (Bulgakov 246). Margarita’s vanishing into the night and her scenes of joy and laughter before Satan’s Ball could be called nothing if not enchanted, enabled by her willing rebellion against the militant order and monotony of the world she has left behind. 

In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s biting social commentary, poignant sensibility, and side-splitting wit explode in a series of increasingly unbelievable stunts, while the complete failure of the Soviet state to contain the rebellion of the sacred and eternal forces of nature does not escape the notice of the world-wise reader. As he stages a battle of wills between the spiritual realm and the starched-and-ironed incredulity of a strictly rational world whose fate man governs himself (for the most part poorly), Bulgakov’s narration makes a carnival out of Moscow and reminds listeners how quickly the hourglass can turn on lives, jobs, and iron-clad ideology. Carefully untwisting the threads of materialism, egalitarianism, and atheism so integral to Soviet ideology, and above all the notion of facts, Bulgakov has created a fairytale for the modern age as pertinent today as it was in 1930s Moscow.