Manuscripts Don’t Burn

Raymond De Luca reviews a long-awaited new film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”

By Raymond De LucaOctober 17, 2024

• History

• Politics

• Fiction

ONE OF THE MOST remarkable Russian novels of the 20th century—Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a magical realist tour de force written around the 1930s but not published until the late 1960s—begins with the Devil arriving in Moscow. Disguised as a German, the archenemy of every patriotic Russian in the 1930s, Satan hoodwinks two hapless writers, both of whom are undyingly loyal to the Soviet regime, then ruled by Joseph Stalin. These writers are model communist ideologues who use their work for state propaganda and whom Bulgakov—ever the literary nonconformist—destroys. One gets decapitated on the rails of a streetcar while the other goes mad, figuratively losing his head, and is committed to a psychiatric hospital, a carceral site where Soviet officials often sent their dissidents. Bulgakov’s madcap opening kicks into motion an Alice in Wonderland–like romp that plunges his characters into a maelstrom of black magic, murder, and debauchery. Allegorically, Bulgakov’s novel is one of the great works of antiauthoritarian literature: equal parts parody, parable, absurdism, horror, and sci-fi, it lays waste to Stalinist orthodoxy.

The long-awaited new film adaptation of The Master and Margarita by Michael Lockshin, an American-born filmmaker of Russian origins, has revived Bulgakov’s themes to fierce controversy as the world confronts a new Russian tyrant: Vladimir Putin. Like Stalin before him, Putin stylizes himself as a medieval tsar and enforces patriotic conformity through ruthless intimidation and terror. Naturally, Lockshin’s movie, a pointed critique of authoritarianism, has struck a nerve among Putin’s loyalists as the regime cracks down on dissent amid its illegal war of aggression in Ukraine. The Master and Margarita entertains forbidden political fantasies. “[T]here’s a saying in Russia,” Lockshin noted during a recent interview with NPR, “that everything changes in a few years in Russia, but nothing changes in a hundred years.” Bulgakov confronted the same political enemy in the 1930s that Lockshin now targets in the 2020s.

With The Master and Margarita, Lockshin swims against the riptide of Putinism. He presents the audiences of his two homelands—Russia and the United States (though the film has yet to receive wide release in the latter)—with a takedown of autocratic politics as Americans, on the cusp of an election, stare down a looming threat of their own. The stakes could not be higher. Putin has betrayed no scruples about jailing filmmakers for their politics (Oleg Sentsov and Vsevolod Korolyov, for instance), and Lockshin’s version of The Master and Margarita has not been taken lightly. After the film’s domestic release, one of Russia’s popular right-wing talk show hosts, Vladimir Solovyov, demanded a criminal investigation into Lockshin. Similarly, a well-known radio broadcaster, Trofim Tatarenkov, called Lockshin an “enemy of the people”: a Stalin-era term that carries potentially lethal consequences. Their fury is intensified by the fact that Lockshin’s film has had tremendous success at the Russian box office; it has grossed over two billion rubles, making it one of the most lucrative Russian films of all time.

¤

The first shot of Lockshin’s movie, accompanied by eerily lilting music reminiscent of “Hedwig’s Theme” from the Harry Potter series, presents a stately building on a Moscow boulevard. An illuminated sign atop the edifice reads “ART TO THE MASSES.” In his novel, Bulgakov refers to this building as the “Dramlit House,” shorthand for the “House for Dramatists and Literary Workers” (in Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear’s translation). It was here where Stalin’s regime bestowed plush residences upon Soviet creatives in exchange for their willingness to publish propaganda. Lockshin thus draws a parallel between these pliant artists of the 1930s and those of the 2020s. He uses this symbol of state conformity to assert his creative independence, reiterating one of the novel’s enduring aphorisms: “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”

Echoing James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), Lockshin follows a translucent figure—some sort of ghost or evil spirit—as it floats through the Dramlit House. We observe the apparition enter a luxurious apartment, remove a meat tenderizer from a kitchen drawer, and begin wreaking havoc. As the film unfolds, we learn that this mysterious presence is, in fact, an invisible woman: Margarita, one of the title characters, played by Yuliya Snigir. Having received a magical invisibility cream from Satan’s henchmen, Margarita coats herself in it and, also gaining the ability to fly, travels to the residence of a notable Soviet literary critic named Latunsky. It was Latunsky, we learn, who had foiled the publication of a work penned by Margarita’s ex-lover, the Master, a writer (Yevgeny Tsyganov) whose reluctance to commit himself to state propaganda riled Soviet authorities.

Latunsky was inspired by a real-life Soviet critic—Olaf Semenovich Litovsky—who lambasted Bulgakov for his ambivalent politics and introduced the term “Bulgakovism” into Stalin-era discourse as an epithet for nonconformity. Margarita’s attack on Latunsky’s residence in the Dramlit House is thus an act of domestic terrorism, an attack on the state that jolts the regime’s toadies and sycophants. (The Stalin-era term for a citizen perceived as an internal threat was, fittingly, “wrecker.”) For Lockshin, Margarita’s fly-by-night havoc fulfills the wishes of so many of Putin’s critics to strike back against a regime that, like Stalin’s before it, seems so dispiritingly invincible.

After Margarita floats out of Latunsky’s now-trashed home into the moonlight, Lockshin transitions to an image of a gaunt man in a mental hospital—the Master—writing the very scene we just witnessed. A flashback reveals that the Master met Margarita a year earlier, before he was institutionalized by the police for his literary activity. The Master had been staging a play about the biblical figure Pontius Pilate (Claes Bang), who unjustly consigns a Christlike character named Yeshua (Aaron Vodovoz) to the cross. (Though remembered best for The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov was mainly a playwright.) This religious play, flouting the Soviet doctrine of state atheism, landed the Master in an asylum. Who but a madman could still seriously entertain the existence of Christ?

Incarcerated, the Master begins drafting a fantastical novel about the Devil, whom he calls Woland. Disguised as a German academic, a “professor of black magic,” Woland unleashes upon Moscow a cascade of terrors, one of which—besides beheading a Soviet writer, the “hat trick” described above—includes conferring on Margarita magical cream so she can wreck a literary critic’s lavish estate. Throughout Lockshin’s film, the Master periodically reads passages from his novel aloud, which Lockshin then vividly visualizes before our eyes.

A “master” can be an artist or performer of consummate skill. Yet in the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, “mastery” became a freighted concept. Besides signifying virtuosic talent, mastery also connoted brutal power as the state seized control of every aspect of Soviet life. In one of his infamous midnight phone calls, Stalin rang the writer Boris Pasternak to discuss the fate of another famous Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, who had penned a mocking verse about the dear leader. Stalin asked Pasternak whether Mandelstam was, indeed, a “master” of his craft. (Mandelstam would die of typhoid fever in one of Stalin’s prisons.) The details of this phone call were relayed to Bulgakov by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in one of the darker games of telephone ever played. Knowledge of that conversation inspired the title of Bulgakov’s book, as it follows a novelist who dared to defy the “masterly” authority of the powers that be.

In Lockshin’s film, Woland (August Diehl) rains hell on Moscow. At one point, he leads a midnight séance at a local theater. He parades scantily clad women around the stage, has a man decapitated—another of the novel’s Marie Antoinette–like beheadings—and makes money fall from the sky. The waterfall of what Bulgakov describes as “chernovtsy,” a parallel form of currency established by the Soviets to undermine the old tsarist-era ruble, triggers chaos among the theatergoers. They scramble to collect the bills. These Soviet communists, ostensibly committed to Marxism’s egalitarian ideals, are greedy money-grubbers. “[T]hey’re people like any other people,” Woland snidely concludes in the novel.

For Lockshin’s viewers, Woland’s frenzied stage performance unavoidably evokes memories of the Moscow theater attack in 2002, when over 900 theatergoers were taken hostage by Chechen terrorists. Citing the need for ironfisted leadership, Putin exploited the attack to solidify his grip on power during the early days of his administration. The tactics deployed to resolve the crisis—mysterious chemical poisonings, nationalist bluster, and the secret police—portended much of what was to come.

Toward the end of the film, Woland’s sidekick Korovyev (Yuri Kolokolnikov) sets fire to the headquarters of the Soviet Writers’ Union, the home base of state propaganda. Bulgakov writes: “Folders full of papers lying on the window-sill of the editorial office on the second floor suddenly blazed up, followed by the curtains, and now the fire, howling as if someone were blowing on it, went on in pillars to the interior of the […] house.” Made combustible by the inflammatory nature of its lies, Soviet propaganda goes up in smoke.

¤

Michael Lockshin was born into a mixed Russian American family in Houston, Texas, in 1981. At the time, his father Arnold—a child of Jewish émigrés who had fled Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917—was working at a cancer research facility. Then, in 1986, Arnold was fired for what he claimed were political reasons. In his youth, Arnold threw himself into leftist circles. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin, epicenters of the 1960s student radical movement, Arnold became a recruiter for the American Communist Party. He traveled to Cuba to volunteer on behalf of Fidel Castro’s socialist regime. It was in Cuba, in fact, where Arnold met his wife Lauren, another young American radical. (Lauren had gone to the USSR in 1970 to celebrate Vladimir Lenin’s 100th birthday.)

Decades later, having been fired for his political activity, Arnold requested asylum in the Soviet Union. The Lockshins then relocated to Moscow and became overnight celebrities, a Soviet version of the Brady Bunch. During the Cold War, when political defectors (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Joseph Brodsky, for example) tended to make the opposite journey—from Russia to the United States—the Lockshins stood out. The story of Arnold Lockshin, Mother Russia’s prodigal son, became a tale of national pride.

Growing up in Moscow during the twilight of Soviet power, Michael Lockshin became estranged from his father’s politics—“It was never my calling card,” he recently stated—and drifted toward the arts. After studying psychology at Moscow State University and then completing a postgraduate program in film studies, Lockshin moved to London, where he began filming commercials for Russian companies. One of Lockshin’s advertisements for the Georgian vodka brand Eristoff won him a screening at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. The commercial shows a pack of wolves taking over Moscow in pursuit of the vodka, foreshadowing the bedlam Lockshin would portray in The Master and Margarita, which is, in part, fueled by a vodka-drinking (and machine gun–wielding) black cat named Behemoth.

After making a name for himself in the advertisement world, Lockshin released his first feature film in 2020, Silver Skates. Set around New Year’s Day, 1900, in Saint Petersburg, Silver Skates tells the story of a delivery boy (and impeccable ice-skater) who meets the daughter of an archconservative aristocrat. Though Silver Skates is a nostalgia-tinged costume drama—a snow-globe vision of Russia before the horrors of communism—trouble brews beneath the ice. Talk swirls of terrorism and the rising tide of atheism in the nitroglycerin-like atmosphere that was Russia just before the Bolsheviks’ coup.

Lockshin turned to The Master and Margarita next. Originally backed by Universal Pictures, Lockshin hoped for a premiere in 2023, but after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many foreign companies ceased operations in Russia. The Master and Margarita was left in limbo. Finally, in July 2023, the Russian distributor Atmosphere Kino announced it would release Lockshin’s film, which many Russian viewers hailed as a Christopher Nolan–style thriller, a David Fincher mind-meld, and a Joker-esque freak show, all united with the swanky touch of The Great Gatsby (2013). Among Russia’s more ideological audiences, however, the film has provoked intense controversy.

¤

A particular source of animosity from Putin’s right-wing critics is that Lockshin, who lives in Los Angeles, had been supported by a Russian state fund (Fond Kino) to adapt a beloved literary classic only to weaponize it against Russia. Lockshin, Putin’s loyalists argue, bit the hand that feeds, much like Woland in The Master and Margarita, who finds a receptive public in Moscow until he turns against them. These critics argue that Lockshin should have adapted Bulgakov in a way that lionized Russia’s past and demonized outsiders—Satan dressed up as a German spy, for example—meddling in Russia’s grand adventures at home and abroad.

Putin’s acolytes, in other words, wanted Lockshin to renew his father’s legacy. To them, Lockshin’s film rebukes not only Putin’s sinister authoritarianism—a form of neo-Stalinism—but also his father’s convictions, which brought the Lockshin family to Russia in the first place. And indeed, in The Master and Margarita, Lockshin disowns his father’s idealizations of Russia. He elicits such venom from Putin’s nationalists because he rejects the patriotism of the Lockshin family folktale. Indeed, Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita cuts to the bone of Russia’s national mythology.

An abiding line from the novel is “manuscripts don’t burn” (“rukopisi ne goryat”). Lockshin visualizes this line with close-ups of blazing and charred books. The truth, the novel and film both suggest, will be preserved and defended by clear-eyed artists and thinkers; it will someday emerge from the swamp of political lies and (self-)deceptions.

Bulgakov’s truth about life under Stalin would take decades to appear. After burning several of his earlier drafts, Bulgakov finished the novel in 1940, dictating its final chapters to his wife on his deathbed, whereafter it was stowed away, as if it were a kind of radioactive material. In 1966, over a decade after Stalin’s death, The Master and Margarita was released in serial form (albeit in a highly redacted state) and, like a thunderclap, rocked the Soviet literary world. The belated emergence of The Master and Margarita thus fulfilled its own prophecy: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”

Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita offers a similar fulfillment. The story has resurfaced again, this time as a controversial challenge to Putin’s orthodoxies and mistruths. It has accordingly sent the regime’s loyalists into a tailspin of recrimination and bluster. Lurking beneath their attacks on Lockshin’s film is an embittered, even embarrassed, self-awareness that Putin’s Russia has been built upon a mountain of lies. The state teeters atop a house of cards, not unlike the disappearing playing cards in The Master and Margarita. Even if Bulgakov’s belief that manuscripts don’t burn feels somewhat old-fashioned, it offers a glimmer of hope that moral clarity will outshine Putin’s gaslighting. As one character in The Master and Margarita exclaims, playing the role of a prosecutor: “[T]he tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes—never!”