Masking

Abstract

Barely two pages into Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, the Devil appears and proceeds to play a substantial role in the text. The part played by the secret police, however, is somehow hidden, though it is nearly as important--almost all of the characters are arrested in the course of the novel. Bulgakov achieves this by describing the actions of the secret police in Aesopian language that masks the identity of the agents (in both senses) involved Bugakov avails himself of the many grammatical, syntactic, and lexical devices avai able in the Russian language to achieve such masking, the narrative goal of which is to cause the reader to hesitate between a supernatural and a natural explanation for the events described. Such hesitation lies at the root of the fantastic as described by Todorov2, which when the effect produced on the reader is markedly disorienting or ominous, opens into the grotesque Confronted with an event which cannot be explained by the laws of the familiar world, the characters are faced with a choice: either the events described are an illusion of the senses or they are really supernatural In the first case the laws of the familiar world stand firm; in the second, new laws unknown to us hold sway. According to Todorov's definition, "the fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty."3 Basically there is a vacillation or a confusion of two realities: familiar everyday reality and the reality of dreams, of insanity, of the supernatural All three "other realities" play an important part in Bulgakov's novel.