Russian Studies in Literature

ISSN: 1061-1975 (Print) 1944-7167 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrsl20

The Little Golden Calf, The Master and Margarita

Igor Reif
To cite this article: Igor Reif (2014) The Little Golden Calf, The Master and Margarita, Russian
Studies in Literature, 51:1, 59-79
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RSL1061-1975510104.2015.11083039

Published online: 27 Jan 2015.

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Russian Studies in Literature, vol. 51, no. 1, Winter 201415, pp. 5979.
2015 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
ISSN 10611975 (print)/ISSN 19447167 (online)
DOI: 10.2753/RSL1061-1975510104

Igor Reif

The Little Golden Calf, The Master

and Margarita
A Typology of Mass Thinking in a Totalitarian
Society
Similarities between Ilf and Petrovs The Little Golden Calf and Mikhail
Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita are discussed within the context of
Soviet satire under Stalin.

It is tedious in this world, gentlemen!

N.V. Gogol
Middle-aged and older people should still remember the covert competition between the two novels in my title (I am counting The Twelve
Chairs [Dvenadtsat stulev] out for now) in the 1970s and 1980s, long
after their authors had passed on. That competition began almost immediately after the first (abridged) publication of The Master and Margarita
English translation 2015 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, from the Russian
text 2013 Zvezda. Zolotoi telenok, Master i Margarita: tipologiia massovogo myshleniia v totalitarnom obshchestve, Zvezda, 2013, no. 12, pp. 18092.
Translated by Liv Bliss.
Igor Evgenevich Reif (born 1938) is the author of Geniuses and Talents [Genii
i talanty] (Moscow, 2007) and The Thought and Fate of Vygotsky the Psychologist
[Mysl i sudba psikhologa Vygotskogo] (Moscow, 2011). He has been published
in Vestnik Evropy, Voprosy literatury, Inye berega, and other periodicals. He lives
in Germany.
Translators note: The names of characters in translated novels are rendered
throughout in the respective transliteration systems.
59

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[Master i Margarita] in the magazine Moskva and is to a certain extent

easy to explain. To that point, the books of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov
had ruled the Olympus of satire unchallenged, until there arose to stand
alongside them, like Atlantis emerging from the waves, an enchanting
literary leviathan who infinitely expanded the horizons of satire thanks
to the holographic effect that came about where two complementary
approaches to realityrealism and fantasymet. The shadow over that
novels rivals was, however, cast not only by the novel itself but also by
the tragic fate that had kept it from its readership until a quarter-century
after its creators death.
It surely cannot be said that the fate of the authors of The Twelve Chairs
and The Little Golden Calf [Zolotoi telenok], darkened as it was by their
untimely deaths, had been unclouded. Nevertheless, they had seen their
creations go into print and win the recognition and love of readers. And
although, unlike Bulgakov, they had never known the dubious honor of
a telephone call from Stalin, they still rubbed along with the authorities
and were included, so to speak, in the battery of approved writers, even
working for several years as salaried columnists [shtatnye feletonisty] for
Pravda. Bulgakov, though, was mostly known to his contemporaries as
the playwright who had written The Days of the Turbins [Dni Turbinykh],
although the publication of his first novel, The White Guard [Belaia
gvardiia], on which the play was based, had been interrupted part way
through, when the magazine Rossiia, which had been running it, closed
its doors in 1925. (It came out in full four years later, but in Paris.) Yet,
after that 1930 phone call from Stalin, not a single line Bulgakov wrote
saw the light of day in Soviet Russia, nor were Flight [Beg], or any of his
other plays ever staged, with the sole exception of A Cabal of Hypocrites
[Kabala sviatosh], also known as Moliere [Moler], which, after being
turned down repeatedly by the censor, saw only seven performances
before being removed from the repertoire.
Thus, with Bulgakov as backdrop, Ilf and Petrov were viewed as the
next best thing to flourishing conformists, while their evident loyalty to
the regime later provided some of their detractors with grounds for billing
them as favorites of fortune, who had sold themselves to Soviet power.
I am not about to hold forth on how distant such fabrications were from
reality, what a hard row their second novel had to hoe in order to reach
its readership (and how it was saved only by the intercession of Maxim
Gorky), or what a poor fit their oeuvre was within the constraints of
socialist realism, and how that ultimately led to their books being tacitly

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banned for a good fifteen years, from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s.
Instead, I can well imagine how ironically Bulgakov himself, who in
general wasted no pity on the majority of his colleagues, would have
treated this attempt to put him at loggerheads with his closest brothers
of the pen, who had been visitors in his home, who had heard him read
chapters from an unfinished novel, and to whom, judging from Elena
Sergeevna Bulgakovas diary, he related with unconcealed fellow feeling.
He had, furthermore, been friends with Ilf since the early 1920s, when
they were both working as proofers of submissions from blue-collar
stringers for the newspaper Gudok.
But Ilf and Petrovs attitude toward the Marxist postulatesthat was
sincere (maybe because they had met with the Revolution at a fairly
young and impressionable age). And they were not alone in this: only
think of Andrei Platonov or the psychologist Vygotsky, whom nobody,
one would think, has ever suspected of adapting their political views
for personal ends. Yes, any number of clever and honest people were
bamboozled by that illusion, coming to believe in the possibility of remaking human nature in the framework provided by the construction of
a socialist society, which always placed the collective over the personal.
And how, pray tell, could Soviet power have held up, if its supporters had
included only opportunists and scoundrels? So the minds and hearts of
Ilf, Petrov, and Bulgakov were in tune, and it was their artistic honesty,
all the dissimilarity of their philosophical and creative rationales notwithstanding, that guided the pens of all three in equal measure, allowing
them, sometimes even unbeknownst to themselves, to lift the curtain on
certain aspects of reality and make their readers privy to things that were
hidden from view for most of their contemporaries. They were, however,
conducting their satirical research in the same field, and, although they
plowed that field differently, each in their own inimitable fashion, some
of their artistic discoveries were in many ways isometric. And it is that
isometricality, which is clearly discernible in The Little Golden Calf
and The Master and Margarita, that I would like to reflect upon in the
pages that follow.
***
In the book Why Do You Write for Laughs? [Pochemu vy pishete smeshno?],
which is about the Ilf and Petrov oeuvre, Lidiia Ianovskaia suggests that
some pages of The Master and Margarita would likely have been written
differently had The Little Golden Calf not already existed.1 And in her

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Notes on Mikhail Bulgakov [Zapiski o Mikhaile Bulgakove], she draws

attention to the physical similarities between Ivan Bezdomnyi (the
Homeless One) in the first chapter of The Master and Margarita (a
broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered
cap cocked back on his head)* and Shura Balagonov of Calf, for all that
Calf was published before Bulgakovs character ever took shape.2
That observation, of course, may have a point to make or it may mean
nothing. But it is not difficult, after all, to cite other examples of cross
talk and coincidences between the two novels. So, for instance, Benders
retinue is identical in number to Wolands (if one discounts Hella due to
her lower ranking), and the suit that had belonged to Prokhor Petrovich,
chairman of the Commission for Theatrical Spectacles, imperturbably
doing paperwork in its owners absence is suspiciously reminiscent of
the rubber Polykhaev,** with his collection of rubber stamps for every
eventuality. Who, though, would dare assert that those coincidences are
not accidental? Yet the fact that the principal characters seem to spring
up from nowhere, like a meteor swooping in from interplanetary space,
is apparently no accident. It is, rather, part of each respective authors
artistic task.
In The Twelve Chairs, incidentally, Bender has no retinue; he has
no need for one there. Furthermore, he brazenly foists himself on
Vorobianinov, which is further proof of how ordinary he is, how undifferentiated from his societal milieu. In other words, here he is as much
a target of satirical mockery as anyone elsemaybe a little brighter, a
little deeper and more charming but nothing beyond that.
There is, however, no way this can be said of the Ostap in Calf. Both
by his external appearancehis athletic physique, his chiseled profile,
and the glint in his eyesand by his spiritual breadth, his simmering
energy (If hed addressed his energy to actually procuring either horns
or hooves, then one could assume that the comb and cigarette-holder
industry would have been supplied with raw materials until the end of the
current fiscal century, at least [LGC, p. 228]), his strong and vigorous
will, and his scintillating wit, he stands in sharp contrast to his entourage
in this novel, while his faithful sword-bearers (Balagonov and Co.) only
*Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 7. Below, M&MTrans.
**Ilya Ilf and Evegney Petrov, The Little Golden Calf, trans. Anne O. Fisher
(Montpelier, VT: Russian Life, 2009), p. 252. Below, LGC.Trans.

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underscore how out of the ordinary he really is. In addition, as a loner

with neither family nor friends (Do I really look like a person who could
have relatives? [LGC, p. 58]), he is surrounded by an aura of mystery.
We do not know what wind blew him into the hick town of Arbatov, we
know almost nothing about his past (discounting the hunt for Madame
Petukhovas diamonds that is the story of The Twelve Chairs), and we
can only guess as to his societal origins.
He could, of course, been labeled a superman, but have you ever before seen a superman so unruly, so featherbrained, so discontented with
himself? In his forewordthe kind of magisterial foreword that was a
sine qua non in the year of 1956to the first edition of The Twelve Chairs
and The Little Golden Calf to be issued after a fifteen-year hiatus (and
abridged, even so), Konstantin Simonov adjudged Benders dithering
and his twofold attempt to part with his million rubles, first by leaving
it on a quiet boulevard and then by mailing it to the Peoples Commissar of Finance in Moscow [LGC, pp. 40710] a crime against logic and
the truth of character. So, once he had become convinced that in Soviet
society the million would not present him with the desired opportunities,
Bender should, according to Simonov, have raged and hardened his heart
to everything around him, and therein would have resided the truth of
his character, in which the geniality and the jocularity are ultimately the
shell and an avid acquisitiveness is the essence.3
I do not know what necessitated this foreword or whether its author,
guided by considerations of diplomatic calculation, was just doing what
he could to help get the book out, but it does not take much imagination
to see that without those eccentric attempts to dispose of that ill-fated
million, Ostaps image would instantly have become less attractive, duller,
and flatter. Because what Simonov calls his shell is evidently his essence, which goes far beyond any avid acquisitiveness. Incidentally,
is it not his expansive and unconventional nature (Can you hear how
my big heart is beating? [LGC, p. 292]) that prevents him from finding
a field worthy of his talents, which would meet his inner needs while at
the same time not running afoul of the law?
Bender could, of course, have started living like everyone else, living
by the rules and taking a cue from Koreyko, the underground millionaire, by hiding his million rubles until better times and chipping away at
it bit by bit. But for him, that would have meant no longer being himself
or, to quote Bender himself, being retrained as an apartment building
supervisor [LGC, p. 423]. Speaking of which, the broad popularity of

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that phrase is wholly attributable to the complete impossibility of imagining the smooth operator [velikii kombinator] playing the role of a
run-of-the-mill Soviet functionary at a regularly scheduled trade union
meeting gloomily taking in the prim and proper speeches of some
semi-managerial Comrade Skumbriyevich [LGC, p. 234] about professional training, cultural projects, and similar bureaucratic twaddle.
Especially noteworthy in this regard is the radical recasting that the
authors of Calf embarked on with their last-minute rewrite of the ending. In the original version, Ostap comes to terms with the overthrow
of the golden calf that he had expended so much strength and ingenuity
to win, marries Zosia, who is still in love with him, and becomes like
any other man on the street in Chernomorsk. And the unwanted package containing his million rubles again goes off to Moscow, addressed
to the Peoples Commissar of Finance. In the last few lines, the freshly
minted newlyweds, whom the faithful Adam Kozlevich had almost had
to drag to the altar, make their sad and downcast exit through the registry
office doors and into the teeth of an autumn wind, he in a light, drafty
mackintosh because he has not had time to acquire a fur coat and she
in a scratchy little coat shorter than her dress and a blue beret with a
childish pompom.4 And the sight of that forlorn, purposeless pair of
newlyweds just hurts our hearts.
But something in this becalmed finale evidently did not work for the
authors. The first thing that did not work lay right there on the surface,
and it was the ideological subtext that required Ostap Bender to be thoroughly exposed and pinned down as a reckless money-grubber. Petrov
went about morosely, complaining that nobody understood the smooth
operator. Lazar Mitnitskii, who had worked with him on Rabochaia
gazeta, recalled, that they had not intended to poeticize him. The novel
was already being printed when the authors returned to it, in order to
drastically redo the ending. The last chapter was removed, and two others
were written in its stead.5 Ilf and Petrov found a more suitable match
for Zosya Sinitskaya than the irrepressible, unruly Ostap, in the person
of Pericles Femedis, a trade union member and secretary of the railroad
artists painting collective, for whom his solicitous spouse (met by Ostap
on her way to the Teaching and Demonstration Food Manufacturing
Center, the young couples dinnertime rendezvous) has bought socks
with a reinforced toe [LGC, pp. 41013]. The authors, meanwhile, consign Ostap Bender, robbed of his million in a scuffle with Romanian

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border guards, to the same obscurity from which he had emerged at the
novels beginning.
But, although justice Soviet-style has triumphed, an elusive ambiguity inheres in this edifying finale. Yes, Ostap has lost. Abjectly pathetic,
missing a boot and without his million, he clambers up the Soviet bank
of the Dniester. We have no idea what awaits him there. But something
is telling us that he will not blend into the serried ranks of the builders
of a new society, but will keep on plying paths rejected by the officially
sanctioned morality in search of his bluebird of happiness. Im a private
individual and am not obligated to be fascinated by silos, be they pit,
trench, or tower is the grandiloquent proclamation he addressed from
the Romanian side of the Dniester to the motherland he has ostensibly
abandoned for ever. The problem of the socialist reconstruction of man
into angels and savings account holders doesnt really interest me very
much. Quite the opposite. Im interested in the burning question of how
to foster a nurturing attitude toward the lonely individual millionaire
[LGC, p. 421].
This is essentially a dig, but it also contains something morethe
credo of one trying to uphold his personal freedom in an unfree society.
And although his farewell to the motherland, pursuant to Form No. 5,
did not come off, the ineradicable presence of mind and bitter self-irony
that he projects even in the most dismal moments of his life can only
elicit involuntary sympathy, however much Ilf and Petrov may have tried
to convince us that we should not care so much.
***
In saying that Bulgakov and Ilf and Petrov plowed the same satirical field,
I allowed myself to be somewhat less than accurate. It was never quite
the same field, because Calf came out in 1931, whereas the last versions
of The Master and Margarita were written in the late 1930s. Over that
time, the country had gone through something of an evolution, and into
the foreground had come, like a seagoing steel-plated dreadnought, the
gigantic monster of the state, crowding everyone and everything aside,
running roughshod over society, and leaving almost no leeway at all for
the private life of an individual, independent person (how precisely the
authors of The Little Golden Calf had captured that tendency at its very
inception; The Twelve Chairs had said not a word about it!). A vehicle
of the satirical principle that would be even remotely qualified to make

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sweeping and profound generalizations would therefore need to be

something equal to that force, and Bulgakov discovered that something
in the image of his Woland.
But at the time when Calf was being written, Wolands time had not
yet come. The kind of everyday, albeit out of the ordinary, person of
flesh and blood whom the smooth operator represents in Calf has been
perfectly capable of carrying out the mission. But now that the private
individual with his spiritual autonomy had been pushed to the sidelines,
nothing else remained but to pass the baton to the transcendent Woland.
And it is impossible here to overlook a certain degree of kinship of, and
continuity between, the functions fulfilled by Bender and Woland in their
respective novels. I have already alluded to some of those features.
There is, in particular, the distance, the detachment between the protagonists and the societal milieu in which they are made to act (evident
with Woland and stemming from his very nature, and with Ostap Bender
camouflaged but nevertheless something that we constantly sense) and,
of course, their intellectual superiority over everyone around them.
Wolands might does, admittedly, rest on strengths of a different order,
although even here intellect by no means takes a backseat, being a kind
of foundation or maybe a pedestal, from whose vantage point its owner
surveys mankinds futile swarming. But on the other hand, it is also the
reason for the psychological vacuum that surrounds the central figure
in each novel. In fact, only the Master and his companionand, thanks
to them, Ivan Bezdomnyi toorealize who this person, thrown in their
way by the whim of fate, really is. However, the wall of incomprehension
around the smooth operator may be even more solid than that around
Woland. Before whom does he cast his pearls? The crew of the Antelope?
Koreyko? Or maybe the technology students he meets on a cross-border
train? There is, alas, no one in Calf capable of appreciating his scintillating wit, and this is not only and not so much a matter of intellect as
of the quality of that intellect.
There are, as we know, various kinds of intellects. Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky, uncle of the deceased Berlioz, is, for example, said
to be considered one of the most intelligent men in Kiev [M&M, p.
105], and had the powers of darkness not already taken up residence in
his nephews apartment at number 302-bis, he would without the slightest
doubt have found a way to register his tenancy there. Another uncommonly intelligent person, and comprehensively well educated to boot, is
Massolit Chairman Berlioz, and financial director Rimsky, as the novel

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repeatedly emphasizes, is not too far behind. And as for the underground
millionaire Koreyko, it goes without saying that he could out-hoodwink
the most seasoned wheeler-dealer who ever lived. I even think that he
would not have chickened out if confronted by Woland himself but would
have put himself at a safe distancealthough none of this, mind you,
prevents him from being the worlds most boring person.
These two novels therefore have no great shortage of people who are
intelligent in their own way. But in most of them that intellect is unprepossessing or even low-rent (as in Poplavsky or Koreyko, for instance),
and lacks the breadth, magnanimity, and charm with which the smooth
operator is so happily endowed. Not to mention that all of them, unlike
him, are impenetrably serious. As you will, but theres something not
nice hidden in men who avoid wine, games, the society of charming
women, table talk, says Woland to his guest from the Variety Theater,
the morose barman Sokov, who has come to complain about the fake
ten-ruble bills that have caused his buffet to incur losses of 109 rubles.
Such people are either gravely ill or [secretly] hate everybody around
them [M&M, p. 206]. And if to that company are added those who are
immune to jokes and leg-pulling and are incapable of ironizing over and
laughing at themselves, it will be easy to understand where the watershed
between ridiculer and ridiculed lies in this novel.
And while the Satanic band in The Master and Margarita is often not
simply derisive but frankly disparaging (although, incidentally, Woland
normally refrains), the author, Petr Palievskii remarks,
seems in no way saddened by this. He is cheerful, carefree, and agreeable in all his descriptions of the band, which he follows with almost a
newspapermans enjoyment. His tone is calm and mocking. . . . After the
first astonishment over what this entire checkered company gets away
with has passed, our eye begins to distinguish that they are only jeering at
people who have beaten them to it by jeering at themselves first, that they
are only eating up the scraps that were long ago left for them.6

That said, are they always jeering? Is it not more accurate in some
instances to say that they are acting the fool or just kidding? It must
be acknowledged that the temptation to have that kind of fun is at times
just too great and that people can set themselves up for it so very easily
as they do, for example, in the scene of the womens store giveaway set
up by Behemoth and Koroviev at the Variety Theater, with the ten-ruble
notes that fall from above. Can one imagine that happening in Paris or
London? Woland himself, in his conversation with the barman Sokov,

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declares himself amazed by how gullible the Muscovites are: But can
they have thought those were real bills? [M&M, p. 207].
The trickster and the tricked therefore supplement each other in an
entirely successful way. We recall in that regard the first time Woland
appears, in a walk at the Patriarchs Ponds, and his encounter there with
a pair of writers whom he takes manifest pleasure in fooling, by forcing
them to find ordinary explanations for extraordinary things. We think,
too, of the shabby trammels in which their writers mindsthe highly
learned editor and the unschooled poetare flailing: a foreign tourist,
not a foreign tourist; sane, insane; an English (French, Polish) spy or a
White migr who has sneaked back into the country. . . That is simply
the best they can come up with. It is not an accidental slip on Bulgakovs
part to tell us that The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he
was unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena [M&M, p. 8], by which
he manifestly means to imply something morehow regimented and
dolefully prosaic a human existence must be that has no room not only
for anything supernatural but even for anything exceptional, miraculous,
or mysterious.
Ostap Bender too is not averse to leg-pullingfor example, when
he peppers Koreyko with tongue-in-cheek telegrams. (Although those
telegramsLoad oranges in barrels brothers Karamazov, Countess
with changed face running toward pond,7 etc. [LGC, p. 146] have
since gained a truly jaw-dropping popularity.) And here is how the
decorous staff of the Hercules Accounting Department used to trick
their colleague, old man Kukushkind: once a year, on the first of April,
on that day of jolly pranks and joyful hoaxes, they always trotted out
the same, sad joke: they would type up an official-looking pink slip for
Kukushkind and place it on his desk. The old man had clutched at his
chest every year for seven straight years, which everyone found highly
entertaining [LGC, p. 147]. And this is in Chernomorsk, aka Odessa, a
city long famed for its jokes and for making fun of life!
But is it really any surprise if even an ordinary joke often takes on an
air of danger in those years, is perceived as an attack fraught with serious
complications for the prankster unless he, like Koroviev and company, is
under the protection of otherworldly powers? Or, in other words, unless
he gradually migrates from Benders bailiwick to Wolands? The best
confirmation of this may be found in the story of the epigraph to Calf.
The injunction Look Both Ways Before Crossing the Street (Traffic

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Code) prefaces The Crew of the Antelope [Ekipazh Antilopy] (the

title given to the novels first part), or, in several editions and according to Ilf and Petrovs clean copy, was supposed to be the epigraph of
the entire novel. There is no doubt that it was intended as a joke. But
the surprising thing is its unfamiliar formulation: why look both ways
rather than the standard look first left, then right? Maybe in the 1930s
the rule was couched differently than it is today? Actually, no: Mikhail
Odesskii and David Feldman, students of the Ilf and Petrov oeuvre, have
established that it was back then exactly as it is today. So what motivated
them to change the formulation? It turns out that the joke is less about
the rules of the road than about the vagaries of the internal political
struggle (When the gentlefolk fight, the yokels take a beating). So, for
instance, when The Twelve Chairs was being written, the Partys tussles
centered around the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, regarding which the
novel contains hints aplenty. But when Calfs time came, Trotsky was
out of the picture and the entire barrage of Party criticism was crashing down on the Bukharin-led right wing. The novels release had, in
fact, been repeatedly postponed, out of an excess of caution, until Gorky
intervened. So, yes, one had to be constantly looking first to the right,
then to the leftbut joking about it was something else altogether . . .
Any joke on that topic would be lethal, and that is why Ilf and Petrov
were moved to hide their joke deep in the subtext, where it would be
understood only by their own kind.8
But if this was the situation in the world of high politics, what can be
said of the smaller fry, of the rank-and-file Party workers and the people
who pushed the Party line at the grassroots? The Ilf and Petrov archive
contains a remarkable document, a response from the prosecutors office to a satirical column [feleton] titled The Uncommon Sufferings
of a Plant Director [Neobyknovennye stradaniia direktora zavoda] that
they had published in Pravda. Although a reaction to items published in
the countrys major newspaper was deemed mandatory in those days,
a satirical column is not an article; it is, rather, an interweaving of real
events with fabrication and grotesquerie. Nor did this piece even name
the automotive plant director exhausted by the onslaught he was under
from every conceivable expediter and procurement officer eager not to
wait his turn for a vehicle. He is hunted, he is enticed by barter, and the
most inventive of the expediters even sends him little notes signed by
one Genevieve, who is waiting for him at the main post office holding

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a rose in her teeth. And when he arrives at the appointed rendezvous,

he falls into the arms of that same swindler, who has a rose clamped
between his pearly whites.
One might wonder why a prosecutor would need to investigate this,
assuming that the joke is taken at face value. But no, the meticulous
prosecutor not only established the directors name but even reacted
with, so to speak, all the facts in hand. As for the letters addressed to
the director, Comrade Diakonov, the letter to the editors reads, the
fixing of meetings at the main post office and the holding of a rose in the
mouth, the pearly teeth, those facts are unconfirmed.9
It is hard and wearisome amid idiots in the wild . . . Those words are
not found in either The Little Golden Calf or The Master and Margarita.
They are from Ilfs notebook, but they can be considered the keynote
of both novels. And is the problem really only the idiots? Because this
is, in essence, actually about the entire human species that the prewar
decades had bred in this country. To lay that societal phenomenon bare,
Bulgakov needed neither more nor less than Satan himself, he being the
only one permitted to joke and deride the Berliozes, the Latunskys, and
the Sempleyarovs with impunity. Yet there is not one single idiot among
them. And if there is, even so, anything that establishes their kinship to
that functionary in the prosecutors office with his report to the Pravda
editorial office on pearly teeth and mouths full of roses, it is certainly
not the latters stupidity. But of that, more later.
***
Ivan, slowly recuperating in his room at the Stravinsky Clinic but now
split in two and cursing himself for missing, under the influence of
Berliozs death that had been predicted by the enigmatic consultant,
his precious chance to query the latter on what happened next to Pontius
Pilate and the prisoner Ha-Nozri, asks himself And what does it make me
in that case? And the answer he hears is A fool! in a voice belonging
neither to the new nor the old Ivan and suspiciously reminiscent of the
consultants deep bass voice [M&M, pp. 11718]. But, the irony aside,
there is nothing derogatory in that appraisal, because a fool who seeks
and doubts is still better than a clever man who knows no qualms. And
however much Bulgakov, in the early chapters, mocks this character of
his (who does indeed find himself in some foolish situations now and
again), Ivan is still the only one, who, as Palievskii observes, genuinely

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develops in this book. . . . The novels story essentially unfolds for him,
because he alone has been able to derive from it something new for
himself, to learn something.10 Had it not been for that fateful encounter
with Woland, he would have remained Bezdomnyi, the Homeless hack
poet, to the end of his days.
But Bulgakov needs Woland for more than putting the benighted Ivan
on the right track and restoring to the besmirched Master his beloved
companion and his violated dignity. In essence, Wolands role in the
novel is predominantly that of provocateur: he forces people to open
up, and he cannot be blamed if they frequently do not open up to their
best advantage. But without him we would probably not have learned
even a hundredth part of what everyone prefers to keep to themselves.
A negative hero fulfilling a positive function, says Vladimir Sappak of
Ostap Bender, in connection with the first staging of The Little Golden
Calf,11 but it relates just as well to Woland. And it is not just the ability
of both to see the real value of things or their absolute reaction to
obtuseness, vulgarity, and sanctimony (in which sense Ostap can be
altogether deemed Wolands precursor, although even Ilf and Petrov
would not have been able to conduct him through the Moscow of the
late 1930s without some support from otherworldly powers)a reaction
that shines an X-ray-like light through each and every repository of those
questionable qualities. But perhaps more important, those repositories
reveal themselves to us in constant juxtaposition with the principal
stage-managers of, and inspiration for, the action in the novel, whose
unique charm and charisma are very nearly the most important icing on
the cake of both novels.
As Aleksandr Men observed, the meaning that resides in Wolands
appearance in 1930s Moscow is that the Devil himself, and his crew, have
a semblance of respectability when contrasted with a squalid and odious
reality.12 Yes, both respectability and an inner cleanliness (I didnt like
this Nikanor Ivanovich. He is a chiseller and a crook. Can it be arranged
so that he doesnt come any more? Messire, you have only to say the
word [M&M, p. 101]) are all very well, but I would rank them behind
a playful intellect, irony, responsiveness to a joke, and a sense of humor.
As, for instance, in the scene of Satans incomparable fit of laughter,
which makes the candles gutter and the dishes clatter on the table, when
the Master tells him that his novel is about Pontius Pilate: Woland burst
into thunderous laughter, but neither frightened nor surprised anyone.

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Behemoth applauded for some reason. About what? About what? About
whom? . . . And thatnow? Its stupendous! Couldnt you have found
some other subject? [M&M, p. 286].
This is compellingly reminiscent of another remarkable burst of
laughterthis one human, thoughthat rocks Ostap Bender to the
core in the Chernomorsk gastight bomb shelter where he happens to
find himself after Koreyko disappears with his millions. There, in the
shelter, he comes upon Balaganov and Panikovsky and learns exactly
why Koreykos exercise weights had been stolen:
So you were the ones who took the weights, Ostap shouted. But what
in the world for? Panikovsky said they were made of gold. . . . The
smooth operator fell back on his chair without saying a word. He started
to shake, grasping the air with his hands. Then volcanic peals erupted from
his throat and tears ran down his face, and laughter rang out in the bomb
shelter, a terrible laughter expressing all the exhaustion of the previous
night and all his disappointments in the battle with Koreyko, a battle the
milk brothers had parodied so pitifully [LGC, p. 286].

Which of the novels other characters would have reacted this way to the
comical situation with the weights, especially at such a desperate moment,
when everything seems to have collapsed, when all the strivings of an
ardent soul, all the months of effort put into untangling the underground
millionaires life story have gone down the drain?
But what helps the smooth operator roll so well with the punches?
The hand dealt him by fate seems unenviable, and in his solitary struggle
for a place in the sun, he has no one to lean on, being doomed to row
unceasingly against the current. What helps him is his sense of humor,
his love of a joke, his ability to find and see the funny side of things,
and, taken all around, an ever-so-slightly flippant attitude toward life that
is constantly attended by the element of play, as Iulii Kim captured so
very precisely in a song for the film version of The Twelve Chairs that is
sung by Bender himself: Our lifes a game, I always say, / And whos
at fault if I like to play?
But while, like a gambler, Ostap is constantly running a risk (Theres
every chance, tough luck for me, / Of losing far more than Ill see),
Woland and his warrior band risk virtually nothing. And we therefore
follow the adventures of this checkered crew with a modicum of fellow feeling but no sympathy. Yet would we even experience anything
resembling fellow feeling, if they had carried out their mission without
acting the fool, with a cold and arid efficiency? It is altogether evident

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that for Woland too, all his menacing majesty notwithstanding, existing
on the cusp of play is an inalienable part of his nature, which, incidentally,
humanizes him and imparts to him a unique charm and warmth. And here
perhaps resides one of Bulgakovs most remarkable discoveries, wherein
he sets just such a Devil against a world of sober and coldly calculating
people who are ready to do whatever it takes to get their hands on a vacant
apartment in number 302-bis or are sick with envy of those lucky dogs
who have contrived to snatch away their piece of the pie and can now
savor the creature comforts at one of the Perelygino dachas.
***
I do not know whether Ilf and Petrov realized how joyless (even in
comparison with The Twelve Chairs) the societal backdrop was against
which the action of The Little Golden Calf unfolded. And that is despite
their sincere desire to show alongside realitys monstrous traits some of
its brighter aspects that must, as it seemed to them at the time, in due
course gain the upper hand over the gloomy negative. They did not,
admittedly, succeed too well in that, yet an optimistic intonation did
prevail in Calf. And this told, in particular, on its overall coloration,
which was so imbued with joy and sunshine that even its landscapes
are in most instances scenes of spring and summerclear, bright, and
as though the sun almost never sinks in our sky.13 Bulgakov, however,
evidently nurtured no illusions on that score (although who knows how
the position of the authors of Calf changed between 1931 and the day
Ilf died?), which is why the novel he produced was more sober and unsparing. Where Ilf and Petrov at times do not say it all and thus leave,
as it were, a gap between the desired and the actual, Bulgakov says all
there is to be said, although the pronunciation of the verdictor, more
accurately, the establishment of a diagnosisis left to the reader. And
Woland is more help to us than anyone in this.
It cannot, of course, be said that the Devil personifies the positive,
humanist principle. But his judgments are, for all that, bold and uninhibited; he is the only one who can permit himself to joke, to wax ironic,
to deride, and, often enough, to be flippant; who does not worry about
personal gain; who, in a nutshell, personifies what we think of when we
picture a free and independent individual. And this, whichever way you
slice it, says a lot. For that reason we also compare with him and measure
against him the novels other characters, whether we wish to or not.
As for personal gain, every mortal man inherently worries about that

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to some extent or other (ordinary people. . . . In general, reminiscent

of the former ones . . . only the housing problem has corrupted them.
[M&M, p.126]). It is, though, all a matter of the price that must be paid
for it. We laugh at the Variety Theaters hapless audience avidly grasping
at handouts of foreign shoes and dresses (the word freebie [khaliava]
was still unknown at the time), with the utmost disdain for the last scraps
of their dignity and self-respect, even though the spectacle is more sad
than funny. The question that Woland asks himself on the Variety stage
have the city folk changed inwardly? [M&M, p. 123]that spectacle
answers with an obvious affirmative. But the folks at the Griboedov
House [now owned by Massolit]those purported engineers of human
souls whose inspiration is directly linked to the validity period of the
passes to Massolit vacation homes: Full-scale Creative Vacations from
Two Weeks (Story/Novella) to One year (Novel/Trilogy) [M&M, p. 56],
as a sign on a door there declaresdemonstrate the very same thing even
more obviously.
That insatiable pursuit for material benefits rips apart more than one
human soul in the novel, and one does not have to be a rocket scientist
to guess the reasons for this. Bulgakov, however, approaches that flaw
with a modicum of forbearance (They love money, but that has always
been so. . . . Mankind loves money, whatever its made of [M&M, p.
126]), understanding that this is only a symptom and the real illness is
more deeply rooted. Almost every one of his characters illustrates that
fact in his or her own way, be it the poet Riukhin, who is deathly envious of Pushkins fate, or Sempleyarov, the theatrical grandee, who as
peremptorily as any Party-sanctioned paper-pusher ever could, demands
the exposure of Korovievs tricks, or Riukhins colleague Bezdomnyi, hopelessly confused between the two Berliozes, the composer who
shows up out of nowhere and the not-composer who is a journal editor and chairman of Massolit. Finally, Mikhail Berlioz himself, whose
prototype was the all-powerful Leopold Averbakh, head of RAPP (the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), except that the former was
far more educated than the latter. But he still keeps a protective eye on
the illiterate Ivan, proletarian to the marrow of his bones, counseling
him to follow the true path while actually leading him astray from it.
Bulgakov has a special score to settle with him, since, unlike so many,
he knows exactly what he is doing.
But this entire miscellany of satirically limned types is only the outer

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stratum of the hidden reality toward which Bulgakov is pressing forward

in his novel and with which he seeks to answer Wolands question. If the
Muscovites really have changed during two decades under Soviet rule,
how serious and profound are those changes? I do not know whether
Mikhail Afanasevich was familiar with the concept of totalitarianism,
which had only recently debuted in Europe, but his novel is, in essence,
a fictionalized study of the spiritual impoverishment of man in the totalitarian society that took cruel shape in Russia during the mid-1930s. And
however much his characters may differ in societal status, in educational
attainment, in intellect, they all belong in one way or another to that society, and its family traits have left their mark on almost every one of them,
as is especially manifested in their mindset. Its narrowness, it mundanity,
its doleful pragmatism that leaves no room for jokes or humorthat,
in the wider perspective, is what bears the brunt of Bulgakovs satire.14
And is this not the backdrop that makes the untrammeled Woland and
his retinue, who not only live but in some measure play at life too and
by virtue of that really enjoy it, so attractive?
(Generally speaking, the leaching of the principle of play from everyday life is highly characteristic of totalitarian regimes, and the authors of
The Little Golden Calf and The Master and Margarita seized very accurately on that necrotizing tendency. Because play, in the broad understanding of that word, contains the element of unpredictability, of semantic
ambiguity, and by virtue of that makes a bad match for the paradigm of
totalitarianism, which inculcates a featureless uniformity with respect to
the living reality. Attributes of play such as jokes and humor, with their
interweaving of the patent and hidden planes, are altogether unwelcome
there. Hence the exaggeratedly serious approach, specific to the totalitarian mentality, toward the most varied situations of life, which at times
descends to the absurd, as it did in the case of the letter to Pravda about
Ilf and Petrovs column. Only dogmatic and authoritarian structures are
one-sidedly serious, Bakhtin writes. Seriousness accumulates hopeless
situations; laughter rises above them and liberates them15).
It is probably superfluous to recall that all of this also holds true of
Ostap Bender, who quite often walks a fine line between life and play,
winning easily and losing with equal ease. Remember only how rashly
he squanders the 10,000 rubles after the robbery of Koreyko on the sea
shore at night, and how discouraged he is to find in his the bank account
a mere 34 rubles, which is all that remains after his client escapes.

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How did we spend it all? We were having such a good time, we were
procuring horns and hooves, life was splendid, the world was rotating
just for us, and then [LGC, p. 289].
Life was splendid [upoitelna; literally, intoxicatingTrans.]. That
very feeling is completely unknown to the overwhelming majority of the
characters in Calf and The Master and Margarita. For them, life is more
like a piece of homework set for them, a burden that, voluntarily or not,
they have taken on. They know neither carefree merriment nor childlike
lightheartedness. And in that sense, a great deal of symbolism resides in
the total childlessness of both novels and of the characters who feature
in themall those Rimskys, Berliozes, Berlagas, and Koreykos, who are
not just childless but seem never to have had children (which would, in
any event, be hard to imagine at their age). The sole exception to this is
the frightened four-year-old child discovered by Margarita in one of the
apartments in the Dramlit residential building that she has been trashing
(a discovery that actually causes her to end her mission of revenge). But
that little boy puts one more in mind of an accidental guest brought here
from some other, alien world that is segregated by an impenetrable wall
from the world of the eternally serious and preoccupied adults.
***
Several years ago, I happened to see an article written to mark the seventieth anniversary of the first Congress of Soviet Writers, an event that
came in the mid-1930s when the work on The Master and Margarita
was also in full swing. And this is what the articles author, Iurii Kolker,
would have us take away from his attempts to peer back into that time:
You say 1934 and the mind turns to the human blood that began being
spilled like water after Kirovs murder. And that, of course, is the big thing.
But if we just place the past under a magnifying glass, something else, no
less striking, will come into view, that being the apocalyptic seriousness
with which the Russian peoples scenes from Kafka played themselves
out. . . . Had the overlords been a touch more lightweight, more lightminded (in the French or even in the British way), had there been a little
less academicism, the people who died a violent death in the camps and
wars of the twentieth century would have been fewer by the millions.16

Kolker speaks of overlords [vozhdi], whereas Bulgakov and Ilf and

Petrov wrote mostly about ordinary people. But the overlords stamped
out the living space around themselves, leaving their entourages with no
alternative and imposing on them the lifestyle and way of thinking that

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were habitual to the overlords. And those underlings, in turn, instilled the
same thing into their own entourages, and the waves spread out across
the country until they reached its most well-hidden corners. What did
an individual person, relegated at times to insignificance and living, as
it were, not his own life but a life imposed upon him, have that could
withstand such a thing? Had our great satirists restricted themselves to
mere mockery of it, they would have achieved little. But their artistic
instincts had something other to suggest to them.
Partisan Soviet critics had a fair number of complaints to level at
Ostap Bender in their day, to the effect that someone with the reputation
of a reckless swindler had no business taking on the role of castigator of
societys flaws, and that the authors should have selected a more worthy
candidate for that purpose, preferably from among the builders of a new
society. It is not difficult to imagine the outcome had this recommendation been followed. That the resultant novel (and I am predominantly
thinking here of Calf) would have been boring is the least of it, since
it would also have been far more gloomy than it actually turned out to
be. Because it is the dual nature of the smooth operatorand, come
to think of it, of Woland toothat creates the aesthetic tension within
whose force field we are able to apprehend the seamy underbelly of
the reality being presented to us. For however unambiguous those two
central figures may, in fact, have been, only they take an active stand
against the pseudo-human, coldly serious world in which the novels
other characters hang out, depreciating it, as it were, with their humor,
their sarcasm, and their irony, and reducing it to nothing. And therefore,
while their very presence might not reconcile the reader to lifes gloomy
side, it does at least make him aware that there is more to life, that it has
other benchmarks, other reference points.
He has read the masters work, Matthew Levi, envoy from Yeshua
Ha-Nozri, tells Woland before the latter flies away, and asks you to take
the master with you and reward him with peace. But why dont you
take him with you into the light? Woland retorts. He does not deserve
the light, Matthew Levi says sadly, he deserves peace [M&M, pp.
36061]. This dialogue, which determines the Masters fate, leads us
into yet another important semantic field, wherein the concept of light
encompasses the entire sum of his metaphorical meanings, for the Masters work on his novel and Margaritas selfless love for him are also an
islet of light in the fate visited upon him, a tiny island from which he
had been unceremoniously expelled and cast into an ocean of darkness.

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The Masters fate, however, is unique, for at the last moment, Woland
himself reaches out a hand to save him. Woland also finds Ivanushka
Bezdomnyi a place in such a clinic as has never before been seen and
which he has every chance of leaving a healthy man. But, alas, contrary
to the ecstatic exclamation that escapes Margarita when she sees the
Masters manuscript resurrected from the ashes [M&M, p. 287], Woland
is not actually all-powerful. He cannot come to the aid of all who need
it and is also incapable of reining in the evil that has run amok. That is not
even why he visited Moscow. And after he flies off, the life in Moscow
that he had roiled settles back into its familiar, dingy course.
Even so, on closing the book, we are not weighed down with hopelessness. Maybe that is due to Bulgakovs mischievous laughter or his
inimitable irony, which accompanies us from the first page to the last,
or perhaps the heartfelt warmth that permeates the chapters devoted to
the tragic love of the Master and Margarita. In any event, such is the
syncretic nature of the light made by the human hand that copiously
floods the pages of Bulgakovs prose. And although he leaves us with
no illusions as to the joyless reality he describes, he refracts that reality
through his magic crystal and elevates the reader above it, embedding
him into a world of humanist values that are not subject to any societal
or political calculation whatsoever. I think it would be no exaggeration
to say that all of this pertains in equal measure to the oeuvre of his two
younger literary brethren.
Notes
1. L.M. Ianovskaia, Pochemu vy pishete smeshno? Ob I. Ilfe i E. Petrove, ikh
zhizni i iumore (Moscow, 1969), p. 121.
2. L. Ianovskaia, Zapiski o Mikhaile Bulgakove (Moscow, 2007), p. 59.
3. K. Simonov, Predislovie, in Ilia Ilf i Evgenii Petrov, Dvenadtsat stulev.
Zolotoi telenok (Moscow, 1956), p. 12.
4. Glava tridtsat chetvertaia (alternativnaia) Adam skazal, chto tak nuzhno,
in I. Ilf i E. Petrov, Zolotoi telenok: Polnaia versiia romana (Moscow, 2006).
5. Ianovskaia, Pochemu vy pishete smeshno? p. 102.
6. P.V. Palievskii, Literatura i teoriia (Moscow, 1979), p. 264.
7. That last one, incidentally, is quoted verbatim from a telegram sent from Astapovo Station by a reporter for the newspaper Rech after Lev Tolstoys flight from
Yasnaya Polyana and Sofia Andreevnas subsequent suicide attempt. The telegram
read: Have learned some details of countesss attempt. Did not read letter to end.
Dashed dumbfounded garden to pond. Cook saw, ran into house to say Countess
with changed face running toward pond. Countess ran down walkway, flung self
into water. After gleaning that text from the book New Materials on the Death of

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Tolstoy [Smert Tolstogo: po novym materialam] (Moscow, 1929), which contained

documents on the great writers last days, Ilf seized on the chance to parody that
hybrid newspaper jargon by finessing it in his novel.
8. M. Odesskii and D. Feldman, Pokhozhdenie epigrafa, Solnechnoe spletenie
[Moscow/Jerusalem], 2002, nos. 12.
9. Ianovskaia, Pochemu vy pishete smeshno? p. 163.
10. Palievskii, Literatura i teoriia, p. 270.
11. V. Sappak, Ne nado ovatsii, in Voprosy teatra. Sbornik statei i materialov
(Moscow, 1965), p. 123.
12. Archpriest A.V. Men, Mirovaia dukhovnaia kultura. Khristianstvo. Tserkov.
Lektsii i besedy (Moscow, 1995), p. 352.
13. Ianovskaia, Pochemu vy pishete smeshno? p. 128.
14. Remarkably enough, the author of Dead Souls [Mertvye dushi] had taken on
the same theme a century before Bulgakov, although he is hardly likely to have been
really aware of that. In essence, is not the linear thinking of characters who use no
more than half of their brainscharacters whom the author mocks while at the same
time being horrified by themthe very epitome of the spiritual impoverishment, of
the squalid existence unworthy of man that all these Korobochkas, Sobakieviches,
and Chichikovs lead? And if we remember that in Gogols lifetime too, Russia was
ruled by a police-state regime, it becomes, at the very least, evident that these and
similar parallels are no coincidence.
15. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1986), p. 357.
16. Iu. Kolker, Kafkianskaia byl. K iubileiu pervogo s_ezda sovetskikh
pisatelei, Vesti (Tel Aviv), September 14, 2004.