Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: Depicting the Divine

Mikhail Bulgakov’s iconic novel The Master and Margarita (1928-1940) famously opens with a discussion about how the narrative of Jesus Christ, represented in the Bible as a messiah and God made man, might be articulated in atheist Soviet Russia. The novel transports the readers back in time to an imaginary Jerusalem to retell the story of Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Christ from a more modern secular perspective. Yet, although The Master and Margarita demythologizes the gospel story, it also leaves the existence of the transcendent open. In this paper, I will discuss Bulgakov’s contradictory approach to the gospels and consider how doubt becomes both a dramatisation of faith and a strategy for approaching the divine.

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