That’s what he always does, as we find out later. And then along comes the Devil, a smartly dressed man, evidently a foreigner, who immediately begins to mess with both their minds. So far, so jauntily satirical – although Bulgkov apparently knew as he wrote it that there would be no chance of ever publishing it. He’s explaining it to Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, known as Homeless, an idealistic young poet who seems not to understand that you can’t just go around trying to speak the truth as you see it. What we see in Chapter 1 is Berlioz’s easy assurance as he explains the correct Party line. But we don’t see that until Chapter 5, based mainly at ‘Griboedov’s’ – as so often, a relic from pre-Revolutionary times that oozes exclusivity. He is the man in charge of ‘Massolit’, the imaginary body overseeing literary production which soon comes to represent all the nonsense – the privileges, the back-biting, the petty rivalries, even the queues – of Soviet bureaucracy in general. The streets and landmarks of Moscow he presents in Chapter 1 are immediately recognisable – as are the workings of the mind of a seasoned apparatchik, Berlioz.
It’s the last of these that Bulgakov begins with. I read this novel years ago, and all I could remember about it was the Devil, a big black talking cat and a lot of Soviet-style bureaucracy. There’s a lot of persuasion in this book – everybody is selling something to somebody – and I’ll come back to that. It’s quirky, clever, merciless in its satirical treatment of life in the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule… and, even in translation, Bulkakov is able to persuade you that you’re in the hands of a writer at the top of his game. …which cover roughly the first half of Part 1.
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