The Master and Margarita as a Lens for Viewing Recent Cultural Paradigm Shifts under Putin

• In Event: Information Dysfunction and Public Opinion in Literary and Cultural Life

Abstract

This paper draws from tropes, metaphors, key scenes, and characters in Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical masterpiece The Master and Margarita in an attempt to shed contextual light on some of the major cultural paradigm shifts that have been taking place in Russia in recent years under the rule of Vladimir Putin. The theme of the foreigner as a perceived threat to the cultural status quo, for example, is made clear from the very title of the first chapter of Bulgakov’s novel, “Never Talk with Strangers/Foreigners” («Никогда не разговаривайте с неизвестными»). As Bulgakov’s specific term for his “foreign visitors” to Moscow suggests at the semantic root level, it is precisely the unknown, that (or those visitors from without) which cannot be precisely defined and thus quantified and controlled, that represents the greatest threat to a culture that aspires to remain hermetically sealed and homogenously or ideologically pure. Soviet culture of the Stalinist 1930s saw overt attempts to control and police major and even minor sources of information entering or leaving the cultural cosmos. Therefore, “cosmopolitanism” was one of the greatest perceived threats to the Stalinist cosmos. It hardly seems a stretch to see striking parallels between the Moscow cosmos depicted in Bulgakov’s novel and Putin’s present-day Russia with its litany of attacks on and imprisonment of journalists, countless numbers of whom have been branded “foreign agents,” or inoagenty. I thus use tropes, scenes, and specific characters from Bulgakov’s novel as a means of creating a cultural backdrop against which present-day Russia under Putin can be viewed and then analyzed from within a larger cultural and historical context.

Author

• Clint Byron Walker, U of Montana