1. Although The Master and Margarita was published long after Bulgakov's death, he had worked on it more or less intensively for the last twelve years of his life. He began the story which ultimately developed into the novel ( “The Consultant with the Hoof” ) in 1928. Thus, in a sense, both novels are in conception novels of the “twenties.”

2. It matters little for the purposes of our analysis whether the fragment of printed matter stuck into the collage, and creating a new order there, is from a newspaper or part of a page of Faust. What René Micha notes about Bulgakov is equally applicable to Fedin: “Pour l’école formaliste, ce n’est pas la substance d’un élément qui importe, mais sa fonction. Chez Boulgakov, cette fonction est toujours ironique.” See “Mikhaël Boulgakov ou la Russie éternelle,” Critique, 25, no. 260 (January 1969): 16.

Both Cities and Years and The Master and Margarita display many characteristics of what M. M. Bakhtin has called the Menippean strain in literature. See my article “Some Problems of Construction in Fedin’s Cities and Years,” Slavic and East European Journal, 16, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 1-18, and Proffer, Ellendea, “Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita: Genre and Motif,” Canadian Slavic Studies, 3, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 615–28.Google Scholar

3. Bulgakov, Mikhail, Master i Margarita (Paris: YMCA Press, 1967, p. 202 Google Scholar. All references, unless otherwise identified, are to this edition of The Master and Margarita.

4. One can find thorough discussions of this phenomenon in Bakhtin's Tvorchcstvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i Renessansa (Moscow, 1965), which is most easily accessible in the English translation by Iswolsky, Helene, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar, and in Jules Michelet, La Sorcière (1862), published in English as Satanism and Witchcraft, trans. A. R. Allenson (New York, 1939; reprint, Secaucus, N.J., 1973), and Baroja, Julio Caro, The World of the Witches, trans. Glendinning, O. N. V. (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar.

5. Blake, William, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Portable Blake (New York, 1967), p. 1967.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 2S0.

7. Robert Mandron observes: “La sorcière médiévale n’est pas encore la femme pourchassée de l'epoque moderne. Pour le village, pour cette vie paysanne toujours sombre, toujours menacee, elle est une consolatrice, une aide quotidienne … c’est le premier âge de la sorcellerie, nourri de vieilles traditions païennes et des lecons chrétiennes pris à contre-pied, nourri également de l’inquiétude et de l’impuissance des hommes… . Maudite comme impure selpn la tradition pluriséculaire de l'Église (et Michelet souligne bien l'ambiguite du culte Marial, qui a exalté la Vierge et abaissé la femme réelle), la sorcière trouve sa revanche dans les pouvoirs magiques qu’elle acquiert: guérisseuse grâce aux plantes et aux philtres, protectrice des faibles elle devient la ‘bienfaisante sorcière.’ Et ‘l’esprit d’en bas’ qui la protège et l’anime, est béni.” Introduction to Michelet, Jules, La Sorcière (Paris, 1964), pp. 11–13 Google Scholar. Or hear Michelet himself: “Jamais, dans ces temps, la femme n’eût admis un médecin mâle, ne se fût confiée à lui, ne lui eût dit des secrets. Les sorcières observaient seules, et furent, pour la femme surtout, le seul et unique médecin” (p. 110). See also the admittedly polemical “Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers” (Oyster Bay, N.Y.: Glass Mountain Pamphlets, 1973), which contains a short bibliography on the question.

8. It is a curious fact that although this broad-mindedness and openness to the unexpected allows Marie and Margarita rapid, decisive, liberating action and provides them with a sensitivity to pain beyond their own, the same broad-mindedness produces passivity rather than activity in the men they love. The reasons for this are conventional and compositional as well as psychological. Neither Marie nor Margarita is an intellectual. The whole tradition of Russian literature reserves that role to men. (Can one conceive of a book entitled The Underground Woman in Russian Literature? Fallen, yes, infernal, yes, even intelligent—but intellectual?) It is always the male hero who is too liberal or too sensitive or too aware of ambiguities to act. This in itself provides the compositional reason for the depiction of the complementary woman as energetic. Conversely, it would seem that the refusal of the Sonia complex (the woman as victim and sufferer) is a compositional possibility only in a structure where there is a male figure substituted as sacrificial victim: on the one hand Yeshua, Berlioz, Baron Maigel, the Master; on the other, Karl Ebersocks, the mutilated war victims, and the spiritually dismembered Andrei.

9. For example, the following passage about the daughters of Satan applies quite well to Marie: “Celle-ci est tout au plus la fille du Diable. Elle a de lui deux choses, elle est impure, et elle aime à manipuler la vie… . Celle qui nait avec ce secret dans le sang, cette science instinctive du mal, qui a vu si loin et si bas, elle ne respectera rien, ni chose ni personne en ce monde, n’aura guère de religion. Guère pour Satan lui-même, car il est encore un esprit, et celle-ci a un goût unique pour toute chose de matière… . De bonne heure elle manipule surtout les choses répugnantes… . Elle sera fine entremetteuse, habile, audacieuse, empirique…. Sans bonté, elle aime la vie, à guérir, prolonger la vie” (Michelet, pp. 149-50).

10. “Ask any peasant—she was known throughout the entire district. She turned up everywhere, and always unexpectedly, like a ghost. It was truly a bad sign if Marie ever ran into someone else’s yard. After her appearance some kind of trouble was sure to happen on that farm: a horse would fall sick, or a reaper would break, or—at the very least—the milk would go sour.” Konstantin Fedin, Goroda i gody in Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow, 1969-73), 1: 59 (all page references are to this edition). Translations are substantially those of Michael Scammell: see Cities and Years (New York: Dell, 1962).

11. On one occasion, Marie does not return, and a search party is sent out. It meets a young peasant who has been spooked by the terrible noise which had enveloped him as he passed the Mountain of the Three Nuns: “It had seemed to the youth that the mountains had moved out of place and an evil spirit had been laughing and howling after him… . And behind him there had been a whistling and grinding and laughter and howling. Apparently Beelzebub himself was celebrating his birthday” (p. 162). As soon as Urbach hears this, he leaves the search party and heads for the Three Nuns. “He knew his daughter well indeed,” as the narrator observes, “if he decided immediately that she would be nowhere else than visiting the Devil” (p. 163). The terrifying spirit was in fact Marie, banging on a sheet of tin. “It is so terrible there you can't resist it,” she says, as she comes obediently down at her father's call.

12. The initial illusion of the beloved’s strength is characteristic of both Marie and Margarita.

13. Her role of energizer and nurse begins the very first time that she comes to his room. Her first words are, “What is the matter with you ? Are you ill ? Then why are you holding your head?” (p. 220). A minor but interesting point is that both Marie and Margarita come to their man’s room rather than meeting at their own homes or in some neutral spot. This is possible only because of the extreme social isolation of both men.

14. Can it be an accident that these women who raise the dead bear the names of Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters ? Many of the names are significant in Cities and Years. We have already mentioned Urbach and Bischofsburg, but let us also note in passing the names Kurt Wahn and Andrei Startsov, as well as the archetypically German town of Erlangen.

Resurrection, or at least the possibility of raising and speaking with the dead, is one of the great boons which the Devil granted through the sorceress in the Middle Ages: “II est évident que la compassion apparait désormais du côté de Satan. La Vierge même, idéal de la grâce, ne répond rien à ce besoin du cceur, l’Église rien. L’évocation des morts reste expressément défendue. Pendant que tous les livres continuent à plaisir ou le démon pourceau des premiers temps, ou le démon griffu, bourreau du second âge, Satan a changé de figure pour ceux qui n’écrivent pas. II tient du vieux Pluton, mais sa majesté pâle, nullement inexorable, accordant aux morts des retours, aux vivants de revoir les morts, de plus en plus revient à son père ou grand-pere, Osiris, le pasteur des âmes” (Michelet, p. 97).

15. This scene is part of a Pied Piper complex which begins with a story told by Kurt Wahn before the war, and ends, at least for Andrei, with rats that he seems to see swarming in waves over his feet.

16. Woland is evidently not averse to taking a tumble with a fair witch from time to time. (He suspects that his rheumatic knee is the result of an encounter with one on the Harz mountains in 1571. It is interesting that he prefers to treat the knee with his “Old Grandmother’s” remedies, rather than go to an eternal or mortal doctor.) The Soviet edition, with inexplicable care not to tarnish the Devil’s reputation, has cut the entire passage.

On flying cream see A. J. Clark, “Some Notes on ‘Flying’ Ointments,” appendix in Margaret Murray, Alice, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921; reprint, 1963), pp. 279-80.Google Scholar

17. Even his prankster henchmen participate reluctantly and without real pleasure in the traditional ball, which they regard as an obligation of their jobs but ultimately a nuisance (with the exception, of course, of the cat Behemoth, who cavorts with genuine glee in the champagne fountain). The distance which Margarita’s escorts maintain from the ball prevents one from having to equate them or her with the real sinners present. Woland’s absence for a great part of the ball and his negligent appearance in his torn and dirty nightshirt (a dishabille more characteristic of the intimate Esbat) make it appear that he, too, regards the ball with some scorn.

18. See Murray, Witch-Cult, p. 150.

19. It is, of course, no accident that the disciples of Jesus addressed him as Master and that Margarita’s hero goes by the same sobriquet quite without irony.

20. Freud comments on this attitude toward women, particularly in Totem and Taboo (New York, 1950): “Applied to the treatment of privileged persons the theory of ambivalent feeling would reveal that their veneration, their very deification, is opposed in the unconscious by an intense hostile tendency” (p. 66). Michelet has of course commented on this aspect of the cult of Mary, too. A curious, modern-day parallel is the language of the surrealist idealization of women, which was in its own way quite as alienating as Mariolatry—and used many of the same clichés of imagery! See Gauthier, Xavière, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris, 1971), pp. 98–114.Google Scholar

21. One woman does appear in the Master’s novel who is absent from the gospels. In the novel, Judas does not hang himself from remorse (a fine, Matthewesque conceit, that!) but is lured to his death by a woman, who serves as the instrument of Pilate's vengeance.

22. The witch, Hella, seems to have dropped by the wayside somewhere.

23. See “The Virgin’s Visit to Hell,” whose oldest Russian copy dates back to the twelfth century. N. K. Gudzy provides a detailed summary of its contents in his History of Early Russian Literature (New York, 1949), pp. 46-50.

24. The Soviet edition cuts the following crucial passage off the end of the chapter: “and the Master’s memory, his accursed, needling memory, began to fade. He had been freed, just as he had set free the character he had created. His hero had now vanished irretrievably into the abyss; on the night of Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, pardon had been granted to the astrologer’s son, fifth Procurator of Judea, the cruel Pontius Pilate.” In the book’s final sentence, “the cruel Pontius Pilate” becomes, as the Master had intended, “the knight Pontius Pilate.” The Master and Margarita, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Signet, 1967), pp. 372 and 384.

25. Breton, André, Arcane 17 (New York, 1945).Google Scholar