There is no multiplicity of narrators in the novel. The voice is always the same. But it has unusual range, picking up, parodying, or ironically undercutting the tones of the novel’s many characters, with undertones of lyric and epic poetry and old popular tales.

Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ‘the deepest contemplation of life in all its conditionality’. It is not by chance that his stage adaptations of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific ‘influences’ stands the age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes — a tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov’s countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as Bulgakov’s novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita. The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it, Bulgakov’s wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical situation from the same cultural basis.

Many observations from Bakhtin’s study seem to be aimed directly at Bulgakov’s intentions, none more so than his comment on Rabelais’s travesty of the ‘hidden meaning’, the ‘secret’, the ‘terrifying mysteries’ of religion, politics and economics: ’Laughter must liberate the gay truth of the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear, suffering, and violence.‘ The settling of scores is also part of the tradition of carnival laughter. Perhaps the most pure example is the Testament of the poet François Villon, who in the liveliest verse handed out appropriate legacies’ to all his enemies, thus entering into tradition and even earning himself a place in the fourth book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. So, too, Bakhtin says of Rabelais:


In his novel ... he uses the popular-festive system of images with its charter of freedoms consecrated by many centuries; and he uses it to inflict a severe punishment upon his foe, the Gothic age ... In this setting of consecrated rights Rabelais attacks the fundamental dogmas and sacraments, the holy of holies of medieval ideology.


And he comments further on the broad nature of this tradition:


For thousands of years the people have used these festive comic images to express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth, and their highest hopes and aspirations. Freedom was not so much an exterior right as it was the inner content of these images. It was the thousand-year-old language of fearlessness, a language with no reservations and omissions, about the world and about power.


Bulgakov drew on this same source in settling his scores with the custodians of official literature and official reality.

The novel’s form excludes psychological analysis and historical commentary. Hence the quickness and pungency of Bulgakov’s writing. At the same time, it allows Bulgakov to exploit all the theatricality of its great scenes - storms, flight, the attack of vampires, all the antics of the demons Koroviev and Behemoth, the seance in the Variety theatre, the ball at Satan‘s, but also the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, the crucifixion as witnessed by Matthew Levi, the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane.

Bulgakov’s treatment of Gospel figures is the most controversial aspect of The Master and Margarita and has met with the greatest incomprehension. Yet his premises are made clear in the very first pages of the novel, in the dialogue between Woland and the atheist Berlioz. By the deepest irony of all, the ‘prince of this world’ stands as guarantor of the ’other’ world. It exists, since he exists. But he says nothing directly about it. Apart from divine revelation, the only language able to speak of the ‘other’ world is the language of parable. Of this language Kafka wrote, in his parable ’On Parables‘:


Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if it was worth the trouble; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least. All these parables really set out to say simply that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.

Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.

Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

The first said: You win.

The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

The first said: No, in reality. In parable you lose.


A similar dialogue lies at the heart of Bulgakov’s novel. In it there are those who belong to parable and those who belong to reality. There are those who go over and those who do not. There are those who win in parable and become parables themselves, and there are those who win in reality. But this reality belongs to Woland.