![]() As Oleg Khlevniuk identifies, that terror was comprised of the threat of “anti-Soviet elements and nationalities.” In creating this concept of anti-Soviet elements, Stalin was able to manufacture lawfulness according to his own standards of the good-that which is good for the state-creating a “totalitarian lawfulness.” Stalin’s Soviet Union translated the threat of war into terror which was a violent campaign against anything that was deemed “anti-Soviet”, and consequently, against the interest of Stalin and the state. Yet, party ideology remained fluid and shaped the party reality through ritual and discourse. The term “anti-Soviet” served to “other” that which was deemed to counteract, contradict, or inconvenience the ebb and flow of the Soviet ideology. The ‘perpetual threat of war’ was an anxiety that informed the notion of “anti-Soviet” thought. The Soviet Union “came into being as a result of World War I, established itself through victory in the Civil War,” yielding war as the genesis for the Soviet Union, and subsequently framing the Stalinist regime. The cornerstone of Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s was the perpetual threat of war. The structural components of Soviet ideology are essential to understanding the work and life of Mikhail Bulgakov. This section will include a discussion on Soviet culture, elements of Biblical imagery and culture, and will connect these literary themes to Bulgakov’s life in the Soviet Union and his use of the archive. Second, I will provide an analysis of selected passages from the novel to support my thesis. This section will discuss his use of literary satire, his interactions with censorship, his works’ criticism, and his motivation for continued writing. First, I will frame Bulgakov’s lived experience and his literary works in the context of the Soviet state and time period. This paper will outline the relevant framework and then unfold in two main sections. As a result, he revitalizes and encodes parts of Christian Biblical heritage (that which is absent from the Soviet Union) and ultimately places his faith in the concept of the archive. Bulgakov does this to highlight the moral limitations of the Soviet system, and subsequently, his own lived experience. In this paper, I will argue that in his magnum opus novel, The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov explores the theme of good and evil by juxtaposing the metaphysical against the backdrop of the real atmosphere of the Soviet Union. These embedded binaries serve as a commentary on Bulgakov’s lived experience as a writer in the Soviet Union, and a preservation mechanism for ideas, themes, and notions that were excluded from the Soviet ideological landscape. This contestation of the “real” plays out in the many binaries within the novel: Moscow and Jerusalem good and evil foreigners and Muscovites and fantasy and the ordinary. The novel presents a creative and curious example of writing that contests the reality it was produced in, leading the reader to a realm beyond the realities of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and 1930s. ![]() by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997), and its exploration of the theme of good and evil. This paper focuses on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita (trans. ![]() Photo courtesy of Theatre Near the Bridge Perm/Wikimedia Commons. Poster for production Master and Margarita in Theatre Near the Bridge in Perm (2005). ![]()
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