RL 57 — Mikhail Bulgakov: Political Fantasy and Soviet Power

Mikhail Bulgakov: Political Fantasy and Soviet Power

A dog becomes a citizen. A scientific breakthrough produces a disaster. The devil arrives in Moscow and finds plenty of work already waiting for him. 

Bulgakov’s impossible worlds feel familiar because the people inside them still want a room, a meal and a little power over someone else.

1. Introduction

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) understood how quickly an ordinary day could become absurd. His fiction begins close to daily life: a hungry animal, an anxious employee, a professor absorbed in his work. Then something impossible happens and the rules people trusted stop making sense.

Born in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire and now Ukraine, he trained as a doctor before becoming a Russian-language writer. His attention to physical suffering helped give even his wildest inventions a human weight.

Political fantasy describes how impossible events expose authority and people’s responses to it. Across four works, this method grows from an office nightmare into a novel that places Moscow beside ancient Jerusalem.

2. Diaboliad: The Terror of Being Sent Elsewhere

In Diaboliad (1924), a small mistake costs the clerk Korotkov his job. He tries to find the superior responsible and recover his position. It sounds like a problem that a conversation should settle.

Instead, every attempt leads him deeper into confusion. Offices, names and officials become increasingly difficult to distinguish. The administrative world takes on the shifting logic of a nightmare.

We can see why he keeps trying. He needs the money from his job and wants someone to take his situation seriously. His reasonable effort to obtain an answer becomes the force driving him toward collapse.

The story turns bureaucracy into an experience the reader must endure. Responsibility keeps moving just beyond reach. Each official encounter offers the possibility of resolution before taking it away.

A name mixed up on paper may seem trivial. Bulgakov shows what it feels like when someone’s livelihood hangs on that error.

3. Heart of a Dog: Who Takes Responsibility for a Creation?

Heart of a Dog (written in 1925; first published in Russian abroad in 1968) opens with Sharik, a stray dog who knows hunger and human cruelty. Professor Preobrazhensky takes him home and performs an operation using human tissue. Sharik becomes Sharikov, a troublesome human being.

The political joke develops through the distance between transformation and improvement. Speech, clothing and official recognition do not give Sharikov sound judgment. His ability to fit into Soviet institutions raises an uncomfortable question about what those institutions reward.

The professor is more complicated than a wise man surrounded by fools. He protects his household and speaks with impressive confidence. He also initiates the experiment that creates the trouble.

His scientific authority deserves scrutiny alongside the committee’s political authority. Both involve decisions about another being’s life.

Remembering the opening helps keep this tension alive. Before Sharik becomes an experiment, he is cold and hungry. That vulnerable creature gives the novella an emotional center that a purely political explanation can easily miss.

4. The Fatal Eggs: When Results Matter More than Understanding

In The Fatal Eggs (1925), Professor Persikov discovers a ray that accelerates biological growth and reproduction. After a disease destroys poultry stocks, his discovery attracts officials eager to restore production. A disastrous mix-up involving the eggs turns a promising solution into a catastrophe.

The trouble begins before the monsters appear. A discovery still requiring careful study becomes an answer people urgently want to believe in.

Persikov understands the science yet cannot control its application. Those who can organize a large project lack the knowledge to manage it safely. Publicity makes confidence grow faster than understanding.

Unlike Preobrazhensky’s private experiment, Persikov’s discovery passes into a wider system of administration and public expectation.

The two novellas ask us to follow responsibility. Who starts the process? Who takes it over? Who bears the consequences? Their fantastic science makes those questions painfully concrete.

5. The Master and Margarita: A City Reveals Its Appetites

The Master and Margarita (first serialized in a censored version in 1966–1967) brings Woland and his strange companions into Moscow. They find a city full of people who believe they understand reality.

At the Variety Theater, money and fashionable goods tempt the audience. Supernatural tricks then make those rewards unreliable. Watching the crowd scramble is funny until we recognize the ordinary desires being exposed.

The scene can be read as a test of the claim that a new society has produced fundamentally different people. Status, possessions and embarrassment still matter enormously.

The fictional writers’ organization MASSOLIT brings these appetites into cultural life. Membership offers advantages while the Master’s writing meets hostility. Literary standing depends on belonging to the right circle as well as producing work.

Housing gives the satire another intimate pressure point. A room means privacy and security. When space is scarce, an apartment becomes something people pursue through influence and suspicion.

Woland’s arrival exposes arrangements that were already troubling. The city has supplied much of the material for its own humiliation.

6. Pontius Pilate: Understanding an Injustice and Allowing It

The Jerusalem chapters slow the novel down. After Moscow’s noise and spectacle, Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Yeshua asks for a different kind of attention.

Pilate sees reasons to oppose the execution. He also fears the political consequences of acting on what he sees. His authority does not free him from that fear.

The tension is recognizable: knowing better offers little protection when someone chooses the security of a position over another person’s life.

Read beside the Moscow narrative, Pilate’s predicament makes cowardice more than a private weakness. It becomes a means through which power continues to work.

7. Margarita: Remembering Someone Else’s Pain

Margarita gains extraordinary freedom through her encounter with Woland’s world. She can take revenge and seek the Master. Yet one of her most revealing choices concerns another person.

After hosting Woland’s ball, she asks for relief for Frieda, who is tormented by a recurring reminder of her crime. At a moment when Margarita could pursue her own reward, she remembers someone else’s suffering.

That gesture gives the novel a tenderness its savage comedy might otherwise conceal. Love has made Margarita determined. It has also left her capable of compassion beyond the person she loves.

Woland remains unsettling throughout. He can expose hypocrisy and assist the lovers while exercising terrifying power. His presence prevents us from turning the novel into a comfortable division between good helpers and evil enemies.

8. How the Fantasy Gets under the Reader’s Skin

Bulgakov often lets the impossible enter through a setting that feels solid. There are meals to prepare, papers to handle and appointments to keep. Everyday details make the disruption more startling.

His medical imagination is especially important in the novellas. Bodies have appetites, injuries and limits. An ambitious idea must eventually encounter living flesh.

He also changes the reader’s position. We experience Sharik’s world through an animal’s needs. We share Korotkov’s confusion. In Moscow, we watch people become performers in situations they cannot control.

Laughter can turn uncomfortable within a paragraph. Someone who looked ridiculous a moment ago may now seem frightened or exposed. That change makes it harder to enjoy the comedy without noticing its human cost.

9. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Wells and Goethe

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) offers a major precedent for making ordinary social life grotesque. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) provides another through disturbed identities and intensely anxious encounters. Both help illuminate the nightmare of Diaboliad.

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) belongs to the speculative tradition behind the scientific novellas. The invented experiment allows consequences to unfold on a scale ordinary realism could not easily accommodate.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) supplies an explicit frame through Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832), which provides the epigraph to The Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov gives the demonic encounter a particular direction. A writer’s work and a woman’s determination become central to it. Older literary materials enter the rooms, institutions and anxieties of Soviet life.

10. His Contribution to Russian Literature

Within Russian literature, Bulgakov carried the grotesque into the institutions of the revolutionary and Soviet periods. Gogol’s tradition of comic disturbance found fresh material in housing committees, scientific projects and organized literary life.

His fiction also widened the ways a novel could examine moral responsibility. The Moscow and Jerusalem narratives approach the problem through different voices and tempos. Neither setting can settle every question raised by the other.

This matters beside socialist realism’s prescribed expectations for Soviet writing. A talking animal, a demonic visitor or an unstable narrative could interrupt the confidence of an officially approved explanation.

Fantasy allowed conflicting experiences and judgments to inhabit the same work. It offered no dependable protection from censorship.

11. His Contribution to World Literature

For readers beyond Russia, these works demonstrate how deeply fantasy can belong to a recognizable modern society. Offices and theaters remain politically meaningful when impossible things happen inside them.

Their international importance also involves form. The Master and Margarita joins urban satire, a love story and a narrative about Pilate without forcing them into a single tone.

Salman Rushdie (1947–) has described the novel as helpful while developing The Satanic Verses (1988). In particular, its interwoven stories helped him solve a problem of structure. This is a documented example of influence involving the craft of fiction.

That example makes the wider contribution tangible. Bulgakov gave later writers a working model for bringing laughter, historical narratives and serious moral questions into one imaginative structure.

12. Conclusion

The most memorable moments in Bulgakov’s political fantasy begin with needs we recognize. Someone wants an answer, a safe room, control over an experiment or the courage to protect another person.

The impossible event puts those needs under pressure. It reveals what people will sacrifice and what they will excuse.

His fiction leaves room for humiliation, cruelty and fear. It also leaves room for Margarita to remember Frieda. That small act of attention gives the reader something to carry beyond the spectacle.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is political fantasy in Bulgakov’s writing?

It is the use of impossible events to explore authority and social behavior. The fantasy changes a familiar situation so that its pressures become easier to see.

Does Heart of a Dog simply attack the working class?

That reading overlooks the professor’s responsibility and the dog’s vulnerability. The novella also examines scientific ambition, social engineering and the institutions that reward Sharikov.

Is Woland a straightforward symbol of Stalin?

Some readers make that comparison. His demonic role, frightening interventions and assistance to the lovers make a single historical identification insufficient.

How did Bulgakov influence Salman Rushdie?

Rushdie has explained that The Master and Margarita helped him work out how to interweave stories while developing The Satanic Verses.

References and Further Reading

1. Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Classics, 2007).

2. Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Heart of a Dog, trans. Michael Glenny (London: Vintage, 2009).

3. Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Fatal Eggs, trans. Roger Cockrell (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2014).

4. Bulgakov, Mikhail, Diaboliad and Other Stories, trans. Hugh Aplin (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2015).

5. Milne, Lesley, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6. Curtis, J. A. E., Bulgakov’s Last Decade: The Writer as Hero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

7. Haber, Edythe C., Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

8. Weeks, Laura D. (ed.), The Master and Margarita: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

9. Howell, Yvonne, ‘Eugenics, Rejuvenation and Bulgakov’s Journey into the Heart of Dogness’, Slavic Review, 65/3 (2006), 544–562.

10. Schofield, Judith, ‘Reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov as Fantastic Literature’, Mapping the Impossible, 1/1 (2022).

11. ‘Salman Rushdie’s Literary Inspirations’, The New Yorker, November 5, 2025.

12. Penguin Random House, ‘The Master and Margarita Reader’s Guide’ (accessed October 14, 2026).