Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  If we wish to find our way into the Moscow of the 1930s, we must concern ourselves not just with concrete physical locations and buildings, but also with the topography of a public spectacle, with characteristic settings and scenes and with the people active in them.

  This Moscow possesses the lustre of a new city, of the New Moscow that had been envisaged in the General Plan of 1935, the Sun City, as monumental and glorious as Jerusalem, the City of the Temple. As Bulgakov writes:

  But as [the Procurator] emerged from the arcade onto the sun-drenched upper terrace of the garden with its palms on their monstrous elephantine legs, the terrace from which the whole of Pilate’s detested city of Jerusalem lay spread out before the Procurator with its suspension bridges, its fortresses and over it all that indescribable lump of marble with a golden dragon’s scale instead of a roof – the temple of Jerusalem – the Procurator’s sharp hearing detected far below, down there where a stone wall divided the lower terraces of the palace garden from the city square, a low rumbling broken now and again by faint sounds, half groans, half cries. (p. 43)

  But the novel also contains that other Moscow, the Moscow of the suburbs, the non-places: ‘fences, a watchman’s hut, piles of logs, dried and split telegraph poles with bobbins strung on the wires between them, heaps of stones, ditches – in short, a feeling that Moscow was about to appear round the next corner and would rise up and engulf them at any moment’ (p. 88). As we fly past, we glimpse the niches and catacombs of the intelligentsia in the Arbat, the variety theatres and sites of Soviet mass culture, the six-room apartments of the privileged, the communal apartments in which the old Moscow urban population lives cheek by jowl with recent immigrants from the countryside, anonymous stairwells and hallways, department stores for the privileged, the posters for spas in the Caucasus, sanatoria around Moscow and queues for the shops, well-known tourist attractions such as the Alexander Gardens and Red Square, but also the new promenade along the embankment of the Moscow River and the shaded avenues in the parks of culture and recreation, dacha estates for the privileged in ‘Perelygino on the River Klyazma’ – Bulgakov is undoubtedly alluding to Peredelkino, which, following a proposal by Maxim Gorky, had been handed over to the Writers’ Union in 1934.

  In order to be able to see as much as possible, Margarita flies so close to the ground that she has to watch out for street lights, electric cables and shop signs. She flies through the Arbat at first-floor height and is amazed by the antlike activity of the metropolis. She even flies past the first Moscow skyscraper, the Mosselprom Building:

  ‘What a maze,’ thought Margarita crossly. ‘There’s no room to manoeuvre here.’ She crossed the Arbat, climbed to second-floor height, past the brilliant neon tubes of a corner theatre and turned into a narrow side-street flanked with tall houses. All their windows were open and radio music poured out from all sides. Out of curiosity Margarita glanced into one of them. She saw a kitchen. Two Primuses were roaring away on a marble ledge, attended by two women standing with spoons in their hands and swearing at each other … Her attention was caught by a massive and obviously newly built eight-storey apartment block at the far end of the street. (p. 270)

  She penetrates to the innermost core of the Moscow lifeworld, the kommunalka, the communal apartment:

  The hall was a vast, incredibly neglected room feebly lit by a tiny electric light that dangled in one corner from a ceiling black with dirt. On the wall hung a bicycle without any tyres, beneath it a huge iron-banded trunk. On the shelf over the coat-rack was a winter fur cap, its long earflaps untied and hanging down. From behind one of the doors a man’s voice could be heard booming from the radio, angrily declaiming poetry. (pp. 64–5)

  The bathroom stands revealed in all its details to the gaze of the outsider:

  Amid the damp steam and by the light of the coals smouldering in the geyser, he made out a large basin attached to the wall and a bath streaked with black where the enamel had chipped off. There in the bath stood a naked woman, covered in soapsuds and holding a loofah. (p. 65)

  A glance at the kitchen suggests that the progressive outlook of the inhabitants did not amount to all that much:

  In the gloom a silent row of ten or so Primuses stood on a marble slab. A single ray of moonlight, struggling through a dirty window that had not been cleaned for years, cast a dim light into one corner where there hung a forgotten ikon, the stubs of two candles still stuck in its frame. Beneath the big ikon was another made of paper and fastened to the wall with tin-tacks. (Ibid.)

  When the Muscovites who were packed into these confined quarters wanted to let off steam, there were the parks, both in the avenues of the boulevards and in the district of Patriarch’s Ponds:

  The water in the pond had turned black, a little boat was gliding across it and he could hear the splash of an oar and a girl’s laughter in the boat. People were beginning to appear in the avenues and were sitting on the benches on all sides of the square except on the side where our friends were talking. (p. 54)

  Journeys to faraway places, to exotic and fashionable spas were featured at least in the posters of the tourist organizations:

  Past the door dealing with housing problems hung a gorgeous poster showing a cliff, along whose summit rode a man on a chestnut horse with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Below were some palm-trees and a balcony. On it sat a shock-haired young man gazing upwards with a bold urgent look and holding a fountain pen in his hands. The wording read: ‘All-in Writing Holidays, from two weeks (short story, novella) to one year (novel, trilogy): Yalta, Suuk-Su, Borovoye Tsikhidziri, Makhinjauri, Leningrad (Winter Palace).’ There was a queue at this door too, but not an excessively long one – only about a hundred and fifty people. (p. 69)

  Queues were ubiquitous, whether for shops, theatre ticket offices or public authorities:

  On Friday morning, the day after the disastrous show, the permanent staff of the Variety Theatre … were not at work but were instead sitting on the window-ledges looking out onto Sadovaya Street and watching what was happening outside the theatre. There beneath the theatre walls wound a double queue of several thousand people whose tail-end had already reached Kudrinskaya Square. At the head of the queue stood a couple of dozen of the leading lights of the Moscow theatrical world … By ten o’clock the ticket queue had swollen to such a size that the police came to hear of it and rapidly sent some detachments of horse and foot to reduce the queue to order. Unfortunately the mere existence of a mile-long queue was enough to cause a minor riot in spite of all the police could do. (p. 209)

  We stroll with Bulgakov’s hero through the legendary shops selling luxury goods and the exclusive restaurants of the capital. The detailed description of the goods on offer, restaurant menus and shop windows presents us with the picture of an opulent city amid general penury, where all the treasures of the world are to be had for hard currency or connections. We glance at the menu of Griboedov House:

  What about the sturgeon, sturgeon on a silver platter, filleted sturgeon, and omelette served between lobster tails and fresh caviar? And oeufs en cocotte with mushroom purée in little bowls? And didn’t you like the thrushes’ breasts? With truffles? The quails alla Genovese? … And the potage printanière? … And what about the snipe, the woodcock in season, the quail, the grouse? And the Narzhan mineral water? (p. 71; translation altered)

  It is not hard to see that Griboedov House is really a reincarnation of the aristocratic palais of the pre-revolutionary era, now transformed into the seat of the Writers’ Union – MASSOLIT – a quite specific Soviet biotope.

  It was an old two-storied house, painted cream, that stood on the ring boulevard behind a ragged garden, fenced off from the pavement by wrought-iron railings. In winter the paved front courtyard was usually full of shovelled snow, whilst in summer, shaded by a canvas awning, it became a delightful outdoor extension to the club restaurant … As you entered, you were first confronted with a notice-board full of announcements by the various sports club
s, then with the photographs of every individual member of MASSOLIT, who were strung up (their photographs, of course) along the walls of the staircase leading to the first floor. (pp. 68–9)

  There you can inform yourself and sign up for ‘Angling and Weekend Cottages’ and also for ‘Writers’ day-return rail warrants. Apply to M.V. Podlozhnaya’ or for the ‘Waiting list for paper – Apply to Poklevkina’ (ibid.).

  Bulgakov even registers the evening sounds of the city:

  The city was already full of its evening life. Covered with dust, trucks clattered past, a few men lay on their backs on sacking. All the windows were wide open. Behind every window a lamp with an orange-coloured shade was alight, and from all the windows and doors, in all the gateways, and from the roofs and attics could be heard the raucous tones of the polonaise from Evgeny Onegin. [Omitted from this edition – Trans.]

  But in a dream or nightmare, our gaze extends even beyond the city, right out into the countryside where the Master lives in a camp or in exile.

  Margarita had dreamed of a place, mournful, desolate under a dull sky of early spring. The sky was leaden, with tufts of low, scudding grey cloud and filled with a numberless flock of rooks. There was a little hump-backed bridge over a muddy, swollen stream; joyless, beggarly, half-naked trees. A lone aspen, and in the distance, past a vegetable garden stood a log cabin that looked like a kind of outhouse. The surroundings looked so lifeless and miserable that one might easily have been tempted to hang oneself on that aspen by the little bridge. Not a breath of wind, not a cloud, not a living soul. In short – hell. Suddenly, the door of this hut was flung open and he appeared in it, at a fair distance but clearly visible. He was dressed in some vague, slightly tattered garment, hair in untidy tufts, unshaven. His eyes looked anxious and sick. He waved and called. Panting in the lifeless air, Margarita started running toward him over the uneven tussocky ground. At that moment she woke up. (pp. 251–2)

  We even find ourselves witnessing a dream trial against an alleged currency speculator, Nikanor Bosoi, the chairman of the tenants’ committee and manager of a diabetic restaurant, a court procedure with all the features of the show trials of those years:

  Amazed beyond words, Nikanor Ivanovich looked up and saw in front of him a black loudspeaker. Soon he found himself in an auditorium lit by crystal candelabra beneath a gilded ceiling and by sconces on the walls. Everything resembled a small but luxurious theatre. There was a stage, closed by a velvet curtain whose dark cerise background was strewn with enlargements of gold ten-rouble pieces; there was a prompter’s box and even an audience. (p. 185)

  As the case progresses, there are unmaskings, confessions, assiduous investigations and torture, from which the victim is released only by an injection (pp. 194–5).

  The undoubted climax is Satan’s Ball, in which Margarita sacrifices herself as queen of the ball in order to obtain the Master’s release. This is a high point of black magic, a fantastic scene with orgies, ecstatic music, and a procession of the legendary criminals of history. They all rise up from their coffins, which enter the courtyard in which the ball is being held through a burning chimney. Bowls of foaming champagne,negro servants, naked women in parks and on a great staircase are the macabre setting for the procession. Bulgakov sets the scene familiar to him from the glittering and exotic receptions in Spaso House, the residence of the US ambassador, William Bullitt.17

  Then there was a crash from below in the enormous fireplace and out of it sprang a gallows with a half-decayed corpse bouncing on its arm. The corpse jerked itself loose from the rope, fell to the ground and stood up as a dark, handsome man in tailcoat and lacquered pumps. A small rotting coffin then slithered out of the fireplace, its lid flew off and another corpse jumped out. (p. 302)

  There follows a succession of figures who file past the queen of the satanic ball: a confirmed forger and traitor, an alchemist, a headless skeleton with one arm missing, three coffins from which murderers emerged, whole crowds of men in coattails accompanying naked women with coloured feathers on their heads and dressed only in their shoes:

  Now on almost every step there were men in tailcoats accompanied by women who only differed in the colour of their shoes and the feathers on their heads … The naked women mounting the staircase between the tail-coated and white-tied men floated up in a spectrum of coloured bodies that ranged from white, through olive, copper and coffee to quite black…. The emperor Gaius Caligula and Messalina … kings, dukes, knights, suicides, poisoners, gallows-birds, procuresses, jailers, card-sharpers, hangmen, informers, traitors, madmen, spies and seducers. Her head swam with their names, their faces merged into a great blur and only one face remained fixed in her memory – Malyuta Skuratov with his fiery beard. (pp. 303–7) (Skuratov was the notorious executioner of Ivan the Terrible.)

  The waltz king Johann Strauss struck up a tune, as did a jazz band ‘of frenetic apes’ (p. 309). Bathers frolicked in a pool filled with champagne, and the severed head of Berlioz turns up for one last time. So too, finally, does Baron Maigel, a personality who was known throughout the city. The magician Woland refers to ‘his unquenchable curiosity … What is more, evil tongues have let slip the words “eavesdropper” and “spy”.’ The baron and spy is then killed by a single pistol shot – he is, as it were, executed on the spot (p. 313). Everything now crumbles into dust, the lights are extinguished and everything collapses – the fountains dry up, the camellias and tulips wither and die. Satan’s ball and the witches’ sabbath, which have emerged from nothing, now revert to nothing. All that remains of the entire spooky scene is ‘what had been there before: the modest jeweller’s widow’s shop’, the apartment in which Margarita finds herself (p. 313; translation altered). The ghosts have vanished, but not without having plunged Moscow, its citizens and the ‘authorities’ responsible for law and order into the depths of confusion.

  Dramatis personae and their portrayal: dual characters

  Amid the confusion of events Moscow becomes a laboratory of human behaviour and the trigger for great changes in human beings. Here too Bulgakov’s intimate knowledge of the Moscow scene pays off , in particular of the scene he knew best: theatre directors, actors, writers, editors, members of the old intelligentsia who had difficulty in coming to terms with the new conditions, ordinary people who sought to improve their lot through activities of all sorts, ladies fascinated by fashion shows, a Margarita who, as the spoiled wife of ‘a brilliant scientist, whose work was of national importance’, could buy whatever she liked and knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared apartment (p. 249); then, professors prevented from practising their profession, culture functionaries, peculiar foreigners, chess and ladies’ circles, alpinist and other tourist clubs, members of a circle devoted to the study of Lermontov, and people consigned to mental hospitals. Representatives of the working class or the peasantry are absent from his writing. Woland is conversant with both the homunculus motif in Faust and the current rhetoric about the creation of the ‘New Man’, and it is no doubt chiefly as an observer of the great changes that had taken place in Moscow that we are to understand his presence. ‘“Do you find the people of Moscow much changed?” …“You are right. The Muscovites have changed considerably … outwardly, I mean … Not just the clothes, but now they have all these … what d’you call ’em … tramways, cars” “Buses”, prompted Faggot respectfully’ (pp. 142–3). But Woland is less interested in technical innovations – buses, telegraph and electricity – than in inner changes in human beings. ‘But naturally I am not so much interested in the buses and telephones and such like [apparatus] … as in the much more important question: have the Muscovites changed inwardly?’ (p. 143). The ideal location for such a study of man is the theatre. ‘“I’ll tell you a secret, my dear fellow. I’m not really a magician at all. I simply wanted to see some Muscovites en masse and the easiest way to do so was in a theatre. So my staff” – and he nodded towards the cat – “arranged this little act. And I just sat on stage and watched t
he audience” ’ (p. 236).

  The majority of Bulgakov’s characters are just ordinary people living in communal housing, ‘former people’ and careerists, a cross-section of the Moscow urban petty bourgeoisie. Their experience is out of the ordinary. Hence the scene is filled with ordinary people in extraordinary times. Things happen to them that they are at a loss to explain. Something happens, but they cannot say what it is. An atmosphere of uncertainty, of suspicion, hovers over them. No one can say exactly where reality ceases and the imagination begins. ‘No one, of course, can say for certain whether those figures were real or merely imagined by the frightened inhabitants of that ill-fated block on Sadovaya Street’ (p. 391). The city is full of rumours. Margarita overhears a conversation between two men on a trolleybus. ‘Glancing around occasionally for fear of being overheard, they seemed to be talking complete nonsense’ (p. 254).