ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In times of political and financial turmoil, Russians turn to their great writers for solace. One of those writers is Mikhail Bulgakov, who died 75 years ago. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin liked some of Bulgakov's work, but considered most of it too dangerous to publish. NPR's Corey Flintoff visited a museum in Moscow dedicated to the author and he discovered that the work is as subversive as ever.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: In the early 1920s Mikhail Bulgakov's and his wife lived for several years in a rambling Art Nouveau building in central Moscow. They lived in apartment 50, which the writer eventually turned into a key setting for his magical novel "The Master And Margarita." The satire ridiculed much about Soviet life and it wasn't published until 1967 - 27 years after Bulgakov's death. Since then, it's been reprinted in countless editions and made into plays and movies. One of the most popular is this serialized version made for Russian television in 2005. In the novel, the devil pays a visit to the officially atheist Soviet Union, appearing as a well-dressed, but somehow foreign-looking gentleman, who introduces himself as Woland, professor of black magic. His first encounter is with a pair of writers who don't believe in him and Woland predicts, quite accurately, that one of them is about to lose his head in a freak encounter with a tram car. The elements of the story in Bulgakov's life are presented in a gem of a museum in the same building as the notorious apartment number 50. Our guide is Irina Gorpenko, an authority on Bulgakov and a passionate fan who introduces the characters with theatrical flair.
IRINA GORPENKO: (Speaking Russian).
FLINTOFF: One of Professor Woland's more troublesome sidekicks is a huge black cat called Behemoth. In one famous scene, the cat plays chess with live pieces in what Gorpenko says is a geopolitical game, just like the great powers today in the European Union, America and Russia. The museum has a well-known photograph that shows the writer as a dapper figure with a bow tie, a monocle and an ever-present cigarette. Bulgakov knew about the dangers of dealing with people in power.
Irina Gorpenko quotes a scene in which one character puts it quite succinctly.
GORPENKO: (Speaking Russian).
FLINTOFF: "Who are you," one character asks, "an official person?" "Today, one is an official person and tomorrow, one's not. And it can be the other way around." There seem to be parallels everywhere between Bulgakov's Soviet characters and the functionaries of today's Russia.
EDYTHE HABER: It's very complicated novel and people get what they want out of it. Those people who are very pro-church and so forth pick that out, whereas most readers look at the anti-authoritarianism.
FLINTOFF: That's Edythe Haber, an expert on Bulgakov at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She says that after all the years of repression, Bulgakov's work is now out in the world and no amount of censorship can ever put it back. On weekends and holidays, people queue in long lines to see Bulgakov's apartment. In the novel, the apartment can expand to infinite size in some other dimension, big enough to hold the devil's ball with all the denizens of hell. On this Sunday though, the denizens are just fellow sightseers, and it's a relief to get back on the stairway with its walls covered in graffiti and hand-drawn pictures of Bulgakov's characters, including many of the famous black cat. Speaking of which, there's a very large, very black cat sitting on the second landing, a cat with unblinking yellow eyes.
(To cat) Oh, excuse me, are you Behemoth?
Under the circumstances, it doesn't seem wise to wait around for an answer. It's much safer to read "The Master And Margarita" at home. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Moscow.