“Guessing” the Biblical History in The Master and Margarita

Abstract

The main purpose of the above article is to show how Bulgakov shapes the characters of Yeshua, Pilate, Matthew Levi and the high priest Kaifa in The Master and Margarita to defend the personalistic and merciful vision of Christianity and thus rejects the model of “medieval Christianity,” which uses violence and the sword in its arguments and practice – regretfully, a model being revived in our times. This was, according to the author of the article, the ideological goal of Bulgakov, and the artistic means intended to serve this purpose were drawn by the author of The Master and Margarita from religious and biblical literature. Contrary to widely held opinions, to create the biblical plot, Bulgakov – unlike the Master of his novel – did not use sources in foreign or archaic languages, but popular science books translated into Russian, often with an ideological colouring like those by Ernest Renan or Frederic Farrar. However, it was not Bulgakov’s in-depth knowledge of biblical history, but, above all, his literary genius – reinforced by readings mostly in his native language – that allowed him to “guess” the history of Yeshua Ha-Nozri, Pilate, Matthew Levi or the high priest Kaifa in a unique way. Findings presented in this article are a result of its author’s thirty-five-year-long research work on The Master and Margarita, which began in cooperation with Andrzej Drawicz in the mid-1980s, continued for many years in the Bulgakov Archive in Moscow, and was concluded – at least for now – with a family translation into Polish of The Master and Margarita published with a new corpus of notes and comments by the Znak Publishing House in Kraków in 2016.