He needs to save this young man from execution for charges that are clearly false.Īlmost all of this is told from Pilate’s point of view – but his dilemma would be instantly recognisable to any citizen of Moscow under Stalin. And, as Pilate speaks to this ragged-looking young man he finds himself being persuaded by his simplicity and his headache is soothed away completely. He is a speaker of what he calls the truth, happily and calmly contradicts everything Pilate has heard about him and most other things…. Into this mess comes the man we recognise as Jesus Christ – the narrator gives him an earlier Aramaic version of the name – presented to Pilate as another dissident. There’s the man in charge, so exhausted by the different factions he has to placate at once that he has a permanent headache: there’s the Imperial party line that he has to reconcile with the religious leaders in the city, and members of various dissident factions he has to keep in order. It’s ‘Pontius Pilate’ and, just as we’ve got used to the satirically refracted version of Moscow that Bulgakov presents, we’re in a different universe altogether. Soon he begins to tell them the story that becomes Chapter 2, and it’s extraordinary. Berlioz had been in the middle of explaining to Ivan Nikolaevich that Jesus Christ never existed when the foreigner interrupted them. But we don’t know that yet, and don’t know he’s the Devil, but there is something uncanny about the way he knows their names, immediately seems to know their thoughts – and is perfectly happy to contradict everything that Berlioz says. That’s what he always does, as we find out later. And then along comes the Devil, a smartly dressed man, evidently a foreigner, who immediately begins to mess with both their minds. So far, so jauntily satirical – although Bulgkov apparently knew as he wrote it that there would be no chance of ever publishing it.
He’s explaining it to Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, known as Homeless, an idealistic young poet who seems not to understand that you can’t just go around trying to speak the truth as you see it. What we see in Chapter 1 is Berlioz’s easy assurance as he explains the correct Party line. But we don’t see that until Chapter 5, based mainly at ‘Griboedov’s’ – as so often, a relic from pre-Revolutionary times that oozes exclusivity. He is the man in charge of ‘Massolit’, the imaginary body overseeing literary production which soon comes to represent all the nonsense – the privileges, the back-biting, the petty rivalries, even the queues – of Soviet bureaucracy in general. The streets and landmarks of Moscow he presents in Chapter 1 are immediately recognisable – as are the workings of the mind of a seasoned apparatchik, Berlioz. It’s the last of these that Bulgakov begins with. I read this novel years ago, and all I could remember about it was the Devil, a big black talking cat and a lot of Soviet-style bureaucracy. There’s a lot of persuasion in this book – everybody is selling something to somebody – and I’ll come back to that. It’s quirky, clever, merciless in its satirical treatment of life in the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule… and, even in translation, Bulkakov is able to persuade you that you’re in the hands of a writer at the top of his game. …which cover roughly the first half of Part 1.
0 kommentar(er)
