"Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name": The Devil in Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov

"Sympathy for the Devil"

Lyrics from Rolling Stones

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've just recently finished my re-reading of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and I found myself wondering whether or not Ivan's feverish dream of the Devil had any influence upon Mikhail Bulgakov's depiction of the Devil in The Master and Margarita. I haven't noticed any clear parallels, so today's blog entry has nothing especially insightful to offer . . . though some regular readers might retort that it never does have (so why read regularly?). Anyway, with that caveat, I'll quote Dostoyevsky's description of what Ivan sees:

And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium and as I have said already，looking persistently at some object on the sofa against the opposite wall. Some one appeared to be sitting there, though goodness knows how he had come in, for he had been in the room when Ivan came into it, on his return from Smerdyakov. This was a person, or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, qui faisait la cinquantaine, as the French say, with rather long, still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with grey and a small pointed beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old, that had been discarded by smart and well-to-do people for the last two years. His linen and his long scarf-like neck-tie were all such as are worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his linen was not over clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The visitor's check trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in colour and too tight for the present fashion. His soft fluffy white hat was out of keeping with the season.

In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections, had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old friend to another and received by them for his companionable and accommodating disposition and as being after all a gentleman who could be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of honour. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary creatures, either bachelors or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but if so, the children are always being brought up at a distance, at some aunt's, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good society, seeming ashamed of the relationship. They gradually lose sight of their children altogether, though at intervals they receive a birthday or Christmas letter from them and sometimes even answer it.

The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good-natured, as accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasions might arise. He had no watch, but he had a tortoise-shell lorgnette on a black ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring with a cheap opal stone in it. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, Vintage Books, 1950, pages 772-773)

I could quote passages from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, but I see little need, for in looking at several just now, I find few similarities exist between Dostoyevsky's Devil and Bulgakov's Devil -- who goes by the name Woland, you'll recall. Possibly of interest, however, is the fact that Woland's demon assistant Korovyov wears checked pants . . . and also a pince-nez, but that's not the same as a lorgnette -- though each eyepiece does give these two comically demonic characters a somewhat foppish air. Still, too few parallels occur on the surface for me to make an issue of them.

Nevertheless, Bulgakov elsewhere exhibited great interest in Ivan's delirious dream of the Devil, for Riitta H. Pittman, in her article "Dreamers and Dreaming in M. A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita" (in Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright, edited by Leslie Milne, Routledge, 1996), writes:

Bulgakov's preoccupation with the Karamazov devil is apparent from an episode depicting Aleksei Turbin's nightmare, which was at one time intended for the Days of the Turbins. The nightmare brings "greetings from Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky". Aleksei's instinctive reaction is to instinctive reaction is to exclaim: "The devil!", but almost instantaneously he resorts to reason and begins to insist: ". . . you don't exist. I am seeing you in my dream. And I am now going to wake up", to which the nightmare retorts: "You are mistaken . . . I am not a dream, but most genuinely real. And who can tell anyway, what a dream might be?" Aleksei next calls his devil a nightmare and a myth, and finally threatens to shoot him. Correspondingly, in Brothers Karamazov (Part IV, Book Eleven, Ch. 9) Ivan insists that his devil is "a lie", "a phantom", "a hallucination" and a symptom of his illness. (Pittman, "Dreamers and Dreaming," page 159)

Bulgakov would thus seem to have been thinking a lot about Dostoyevsky's Devil, at least in his play Days of the Turbins, which leads me to wonder if some profounder parallels exist between devils in The Master and Margarita and The Brothers Karamazov that aren't obviously visible on the surface. In comparing the devils in these two Russian authors' works generally, Pittman argues that "Both Dostoevsky's and Bulgakov's devils represent or evoke ideas which the intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual, protagonists try to resist or to suppress on the grounds of reason, but which surge forth from their minds involuntarily . . . [and] emerge as metaphorical extensions or aspects of the protagonists' own personalities, of their 'shadow' selves" (page 159), a point perhaps well taken for Ivan's Devil in Brothers Karamazov though it seems less likely in Master and Margarita, for Ivan alone sees the Devil in the former, whereas all of the characters see the various devils in the latter -- but you can read further on Pittman's views for yourself.

As for the Rolling Stones and their infamous "Sympathy for the Devil," they seem to take his existence for granted in his rather traditional role -- though Douglas Cruickshank and "others" want to find Mick Jagger's inspired writing "under the spell of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic allegorical novel of good and evil, 'The Master and Margarita.'" Read Cruickshank's remarks if you will, but also go to the source itself, the song:

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long long year stolen many man's soul and faith
I was around when Jesus Christ had His moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

Stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tzar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank held a gen'rals rank when the blitzkrieg
raged and the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name. Oh yeah
Ah what's puzzling you is the nature of my game. Oh yeah

I watched the glee while your kings and queens fought for
ten decades for the Gods they made
I shouted out "Who killed the Kennedy's?" when after all
it was you and me
Let me please introduce myself I'm a man of wealth and taste
And I lay traps for troubadors who get killed before they reach Bombay
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name. Oh yeah
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game. Oh yeah
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners, Saints
as heads is tails, just call me Lucifer 'cause I'm in need
of some restraint
So if you meet me, have some courtesy have some sympathy
and some taste
Use all your well learned politesse or I'll lay your soul to waste
Pleased to meet you hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game

As I noted, this Satan seems more traditional -- dangerous and to be taken very seriously. For an eight-minute recording of the Stones' 1968 live performance of this song, go to You Tube and along with John Lennon . . . enjoy?

Vladimir Putin as Grand Inquisitor?

The Washington Post

I see that I'm not the only one reading The Brothers Karamazov these days, for David Ignatius of the Washington Post is drawing upon Dostoyevsky's famous novel to portray Vladimir Putin as "Russia's Grand Inquisitor" (July 1, 2009):

As Barack Obama packs for his trip to Russia next week, he should bring along a copy of "The Brothers Karamazov." For the modern Russia of Vladimir Putin is still struggling with the same political riddles that Fyodor Dostoyevsky described 130 years ago.

Human beings would happily trade their freedom for food and security, Dostoyevsky wrote in the novel's famous chapter, "The Grand Inquisitor." In place of this anarchic freedom, the Inquisitor offered the people "miracle, mystery and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts."

There's a palpable sense here that Putin has brought "miracle, mystery and authority" to a Russia that was severely traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The country is certainly less free than it was under Boris Yeltsin, but Putin is immensely popular -- and nobody wants to return to the crazy, freewheeling time of transition.

Vladimir Putin as the Grand Inquisitor? But I thought that President Bush had looked into Putin's eyes and taken the measure of the man's soul. Apparently, Bush should have read Dostoyevsky first to acquire the properly standardized metric for measuring Putin to see how well the Russian leader's muscular frame might fit the ascetic Inquisitor's "coarse, old, monk's cassock" and how capable this former KGB agent might be of providing "miracle, mystery, and authority" for contemporary Russia.

Certainly, Putin has his authoritarian tendencies that have stood him in good stead in a culture that prizes strong leaders:

Putin is the tough guy who put a wounded country back together after the fall of communism. "Russia emerged from the chaos of 1991 with disproportionately large political and socio-psychological scars," explained Alexey Chesnakov, a former Putin adviser who is director of the Center for Current Policy. When Putin became president in 1999, he brought "authoritarianism by consensus," said the head of another Russian think tank.

Ignatius doesn't offer quotes on what the "miracle" and the "mystery" are. Perhaps the miracle was the oil-boom wealth and the mystery Putin's continuing popularity despite the oil-price bust. Or are the miracle and the mystery Putin's perhaps authentic affirmation of Russian Orthodox Christianity?

And who's Christ in this drama, anyway? In Dostoyevsky's version, the terrible Grand Inquisitor has to be confronted by the one "with a gentle smile of infinite compassion" that perhaps overcomes even the Inquisitor's cynicism. Would that be President Obama? I suppose that I could here descend to the level of joking about "Obamessiah" . . . but I won't. Instead, I'll simply quote again from the article by Ignatius, who . . .

. . . was pleased when yet another Putin adviser, a publisher who helped organize the conference, reassured the group that these problems [of freedom versus authority] go back more than a century: "This is a Russian conversation you can see since Dostoyevsky's time."

A conversation that sometimes grows as heated as an argument, admittedly. Anyway, I guess that I have chosen the precisely right time to re-read Dostoyevsky's great work since it's now required reading for Russia experts such as myself, and I trust that I am maintaining proper modesty in suggesting that President Obama ought to take me aboard as one of his advisors when he heads for Russia to talk with the inquisitive Putin.

Dostoyevsky's Kantian 'Proof' of God

Immanuel Kant

'the immortal Kant'

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some readers may recall that I recently re-read Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus, The Master and Margarita. If so, those readers will surely recall the passage that I cited on Kant. Berlioz and Bezdomny had been speaking of Christ just before the novel's opening scene, when they were suddenly joined by the devil, i.e., Woland, who was extraordinarily interested in their atheism:

"But, may I ask," resumed the guest from abroad after a moment's troubled reflection, "what do you make of the proofs of God's existence, of which, as you know, there are five?"

"Alas!" answered Berlioz regretfully, "all of those proofs are worthless, and mankind has long since consigned them to oblivion. Surely you would agree that reason dictates that there can be no proof of God's existence."

"Bravo!" exclaimed the foreigner, "Bravo! You've said just what that restless old sage Immanuel said about this very same subject. But here's the rub: he completely demolished all five proofs, and then, in a seeming display of self-mockery, he constructed a sixth proof all his own!"

"Kant's proof," retorted the educated editor with a faint smile, "is also unconvincing. No wonder Schiller said that only slaves could be satisfied with Kant's arguments on this subject, while Strauss simply laughed at his proof." (Bulgakov, Master and Margarita, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, pages 7-8)

Kant's proof, proposed in his Critique of Practical Reason, held that even though one cannot demonstrate the existence of God as an idea of pure reason, the idea of God is inextricably bound up with the link between happiness and morality, for only God can guarantee immortality as reward for moral virtue. Therefore, absolute morality, the gift of immortality, and the existence of God are all essential postulates of practical reason even though they cannot be grounded in pure reason. Or something like that.

Bulgakov may have been reflecting not only upon a passage in Kant but also upon a scene in The Brothers Karamazov, for in an early passage in the novel, Dostoyevsky -- or, at least, his omniscient albeit mortal narrator -- has Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov recount something that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov had said a few days earlier:

"I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch's theories." (Dostoyevsky, The Brother's Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), translated by Constance Garnett, page 78)

Obviously, Ivan -- and therefore Dostoyevsky -- had in mind Kant's sixth proof of God's existence, the moral argument in which God is a postulate of practical reason necessary for guaranteeing the ground of morality, namely immortality. Thus does Ivan hold that "whole natural law [of love for others] lies in . . . the belief in immortality," without which, "nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful."

Dostoyevsky may also have been alluding to the legendary founder of the mysterious but ruthless Assassians, Hasan-i-Sabah, a rather unorthodox Muslim who reputedly stated, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," perhaps based on an extreme interpretation of Surah 3:54 (cf. 8:30) in the Qur'an, which according to some translations states that "Allah is the best of deceivers" ("Allahu khayru al-makireena," the lexical form of makireena, i.e., makara, having as one of its meanings "to practice deceit" [cf. Miim-Kaf-Ra; also Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (pdf)]).

But God knows best . . . even if He isn't telling.