The August issue of Focus Storia magazine is now on newsstands, half dedicated to a series of large articles that examine, from various points of view, the trial of Jesus, the figure of Pontius Pilate and the problems and historical dilemmas concerning that event of 2021 years ago. Event of eternal relevance, constant subject of films and books, and of course among these books stands out “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov. The novel unfolds on two interrelated levels: the first story unfolds in the Russia of communism which has recently become established, but already irremediably compromised, and the second in Roman Palestine at the time of Jesus. The two parallel stories will arrive at a final synthesis with the help of magical realism that runs through all the pages.
We point out a curiosity, which seems to us not to have been noticed so far: in our 2021 it will be one hundred years since Bulgakov arrived in Moscow and was hired as secretary at the literary section of the People’s Commissariat for Public and Political Education. This may seem like a minor notation, and it is for history, yet it has its own importance in the story of the writer because it is there, in that Commissariat that he liked so little, that Bulgakov discovered the perverse mixture of literature, political power and literary criticism. . Satire against the caste of literary critics and against the pretense of bureaucratizing and politicizing culture are among the central themes of “The Master and Margarita”; Bulgakov had already got wind of it with the difficulties that his first important writing, “The White Guard”, encountered, but it was in that brief and negative experience of 1921 that he got to know the system from within.
Before and after Bulgakov there have been writers who have dealt much more violent blows to Soviet power, but the doubt arises that these writers have disappeared along with the system they opposed; for example, are there many readers of Solgenitsin today? Are many today interested in his arrows to a dead world? We are not able to answer with numbers of course, but the doubt remains. While there is no doubt that Bulgakov is immortal. Perhaps because his irony is a more effective weapon. And also because his work is more multifaceted and universal, it does not speak only of Russia in the thirties but also of Palestine of the year zero, and ultimately it speaks of all of history and of all humanity.
