Walking the Wall

In our society we consider it a right, if we consider it at all, to pick up a book and read it out in the open, no hiding–unless it is a book we think would be embarrassing to be caught reading. Publishers consider it a right to publish whatever they choose, and authors, while still having to struggle to find someone who will publish their work, don’t need to fear being killed for what they write.

Whether or not it is a right, there is no question that it is a privilege we enjoy. I never really thought about it all that much until I was recently talking to a Russian woman who immigrated from Russian six years ago. We were discussing literature and I mentioned that Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is one of my favorite novels–to which she replied that her favorite novel of all time is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov never saw his piece published and it was only partly, and accidentally, published in a magazine (censored) in the 1960s after Stalin and Bulgakov’s death. During his lifetime, Bulgakov was so worried that what he was writing would be found out that very few people even knew of the novel’s existence and at one point he even burned what he had written when he thought it might be discovered. He once wrote a letter to the government that if nothing of his was ever going to be published, couldn’t he just emigrate and if he couldn’t emigrate, putting him to work in a theatre. Stalin himself called him to decline his emigration but he was hired by a theatre shortly thereafter.

One of the phrases from the book that became a catch phrase in Russia after its publication was “manuscripts don’t burn”–truth can’t be killed. “The novel breathed an air of freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia,” writes Richard Pevear in the introduction to the book. Bulgokav uses the fantastical and the format of the fairy tale in a very deliberate and specific way which Sona Hoisington sums up: “The fairy tale, which permits no moral ambiguity, is a singularly appropriate vehicle for expressing Bulgakov’s belief in an absolute morality and in the existence of a just God. … Even more important, the fairy tale is used to affirm Bulgakov’s belief in the magic power of art” (53) . The book exemplifies the freedom of spirit in middle of a world that was anything but free and uses the fairy tale to point to the significance of Truth.

People were ready for this message and the magazine sold out in hours. Full, and uncensored, texts of the book were hand typed and passed around in a samizdat version to people and reading groups met in secret to discuss the book and its words. It all sounds so much a part of some mythical, historical other place–long ago, and far away–but Tatiana, who told me it was the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, first read the book in this format. It was typed up and passed to her by a co-worker and she stayed up and read it in two days and all these years later you can see the power the book had in her eyes as she talks about it. Not so long ago, and really not so far away.

The next day I went to the bookstore, picked up the book, took it to the cashier to purchase, and started reading it at a nearby restaurant in broad daylight. A privilege.