Published November 5, 2024
“Poetry is respected only in this country – people kill for it,” the Soviet Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam once said, simultaneously predicting his own fate. “There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” Mandelstam survived exile to the city of Voronezh, immortalized in verse as that raven, that knife, voron / nezh, only to be sent once more to die in a frigid far-east transit camp; Vladimir Mayakovsky, censored by Stalin, shot himself in the chest; Sergei Yesenin and Marina Tsvetaeva preferred hanging. Isaac Babel was executed by firing squad, a fate shared by almost all caught a decade later during the Night of the Murdered Poets. There are many ways to kill a writer. Anna Akhmatova, as with Nikolai Gogol a century prior, burned her own writings; Boris Pilnyak publicly renounced his, yet he was still executed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Yevgeny Zamyatin, barely able to escape the Soviet Union, died of a broken heart, lonely and penniless.
In no other dictatorship was poetry and art so hotly debated and punished by the leadership as in the Soviet Union. The highest levels of government routinely involved themselves in scrutinizing souls – even to the point of rewriting titles. “But he’s a master, isn’t he? Is he a master of his art?” Stalin infamously asked of Mandelstam in a surprise phone call to a stupefied Boris Pasternak. In Russia today, amid the return of state censorship, it is a question in need of being asked again, a question at the center of an important literary work of faith and its film adaptation released in early 2024.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one of the most-read Russian novels of the twentieth century. The film adaptation by director Michael Lockshin has become a surprise hit, amassing the highest ever domestic circulation for a film rated 18+, even amid calls for its censorship in Russia. Yet the improbable success and significance of both works is more than merely a response to censorship, as most of the Western coverage has made it out to be – in the Russia of today and the Soviet Union of yesterday, repression was never in short supply. Instead, it is about substance. It is in faith, the most serious of topics, that Bulgakov so effectively conveys his resistance to tyranny.
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Alexander Raikin is a Visiting Fellow in the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research focuses on the dignity of human life and end-of-life issues, especially on its impact on the field of medicine and broader ethical questions of social belonging.
