When Mikhail Bulgakov graduated from medical school in 1916 he was posted to the remote Russian countryside. He was a city kid, the son of a professor from Kiev, assigned a sprawling rural territory. There were no telephones, no electricity.
He had a wife, Tatiana, and a morphine habit, acquired after being wounded in the first World War.
In February 1918, he came home to Kiev and hung out a shingle to try to make it in private practice. But there was a civil war. Ten coups in a year. Twice Bulgakov was conscripted into service, and in early 1919, he was mobilized as a physician by the Ukrainian army.
In the Northern Caucus, he caught typhus. Meanwhile, Tatiana and most of his family emigrated to France. Bulgakov was offered a job as a physician in Paris but was refused permission to leave Russia. He never saw Tatiana again. He was 28 years old and pretty much alone in the world.
There was an upside. Bulgakov had never wanted to be a doctor. He quit medicine and morphine--cold turkey--and became a writer.
Which wasn't easy in the brand-new Soviet Union, though it started off well enough.
"Once in 1919 when I was traveling at night by train I wrote a short story," he wrote in his autobiography. "In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story."
Within a couple of years he was a successful playwright who'd published a book of what the French call feuilletons, short pieces sort of like what The New Yorker runs in its Talk of the Town section.
He was no revolutionary; he was what most of us would be were we in his situation--a fellow traveler. Which means he went along with the Soviets but thought his own thoughts. Still, his career stalled. His first novel, The White Guard, was banned because it had no Communist heroes. His short stories were published but came under dangerous criticism: Bulgakov was branded "an enemy of the people," a "neo-bourgeois" and an "internal emigré."
This next novel, Heart of a Dog, was suppressed. And just like that, Bulgakov was out of the literature game.
Things weren't going well in the theater realm, either. He had a run of unmade plays, one of which was personally banned by Joseph Stalin because he believed it glorified emigration and portrayed the leaders of the White Army in a favorable light.
Yet Stalin for some reason liked Bulgakov and protected him from the purges. In 1929, when Bulgakov's autobiographical play The Days of the Turbins--based on The White Guard--closed after some nasty reviews, Stalin intervened. The play was restarted and ran for 10 years. Stalin saw it at least 15 times.
Stalin even got Bulgakov a job with the Moscow Art Theater after the playwright promised he would "without a tinge of wrecking" produce whatever plays were assigned to him.
"I beg the Soviet government to do with me as it sees fit, but do something," Bulgakov wrote to Stalin, "because I . . . am faced at present with poverty, the street, the end."
Saved by the dictator from arrest and execution, Bulgakov never had another book published or play produced during his lifetime. He spent the last years of his life rewriting from memory a satirical novel he had thrown into the fire at the height of his hopelessness.
It was about a Professor Woland, "a specialist in black magic," who mysteriously appears in Moscow in 1930, accompanied by an odd entourage that includes "an enormous black cat with cavalry moustache, that walks on two legs," a vampire and a fanged ginger in "a good-quality striped suit." Woland comes upon a discussion between the editor Berlioz and the poet Ivan, who writes under the pen name Homeless, about an anti-religious poem Homeless had written for Berlioz's publication.
Berlioz isn't happy with the poem because, while Homeless has made Jesus a flawed and distinctly non-divine character, the editor insists Jesus never existed. Woland is delighted to overhear an argument between atheists and inserts himself into the conversation. In one translation, he says:
"Please excuse me, for permitting myself, without introduction . . ."
Woland predicts Berlioz's imminent death, and moves into his apartment after he witnesses it.
It is suggested that Woland is Satan, presenting as an urbane gentleman. Even as he reviews all the catastrophe he has visited on humanity (his greatest triumph was Pontius Pilate's cowardly decision to wash his hands and give the people calling for Christ's execution what they wanted) he is appalled by the numbing bureaucracy and groupthink of the Soviet culture. In the end Woland hosts a spring ball--based on the Spring Ball hosted by Ambassador William Bullitt at his Moscow residence Spaso House in 1935--where all the dark celebrities of history appear.
That novel, The Master and Margarita, was not published until 26 years after Bulgakov's death in 1940. Sometime the next year, British singer Marianne Faithfull read it and passed it onto her boyfriend Mick Jagger.
He set it to a ticking samba beat.
"Sympathy for the Devil" was released 50 years ago last week; it was the track that kicked off Beggars Banquet, the Rolling Stones' back-to-basics return to raunch and blues after the trippy experimentation of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
You can take it a lot of ways. As the moment the hippie dream curdled. As a potentially dirgy blues song Keith Richards saved by suggesting a move away from 4/4 time. As the rock 'n' roll singer finally embracing a role thrust upon him by the White Citizens' Councils and the Bible Belt hysterics.
Some people see the devil everywhere.
I don't. To me he is like electricity--I don't see him, just his power. I imagine he is as real as the mud caked on the boots of storm troopers. Real as a virus lurking in the whispering blood of the walking dead. Real as the flicking tongues of fire throwing shadows on the walls of our cave brains.
To imagine the devil as a singular personality is to assign him a particular intelligence; to compartmentalize evil and deny its ubiquity. The devil is in the details and in the grand scheme; the devil is the failure of faith--in a higher power, in the capacity of human beings to rise above their animal nature, in ourselves to do what is necessary and correct. The devil is not a stranger, though we hardly ever recognize him.
After all, who killed the Kennedys?
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 12/11/2018