Literature (Un)defeated by Ideology: Mikhail Bulgakov’s Judgment of Russia and Revenge on Stalin in The Master and Margarita
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: One of the special focuses of law and literature is law on literature. This examines how various issues connected with literature are regulated by law. This article addresses the issue of the intervention of the state in artistic freedom of expression, drawing on the situation of the artist in the totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union. In Stalinist Russia, artists were not only imprisoned or condemned to death, but they were also subjected to various forms of pressure. Ultimately, the greatest problem for many of them was the imprisonment of human thought (what Czesław Miłosz called “the captive mind”). Mikhail Bulgakov was a writer who did not give in. He spent twelve years, up to his death, working on The Master and Margarita, in which he tried to settle accounts with the Soviet system and its ideology, while simultaneously coming to terms with Stalin personally. Bulgakov’s history and that of his most important work open up a rich field for analysis of how in a totalitarian state various procedures were employed to legitimize the interference of the state in literature. Such steps included: decrees suspending freedom of the press and introducing censorship; creating institutions that aimed to monitor the ideological correctness of literature; and producing an index of forbidden books and lists of enemies of the state. The article presents an artist who, against this background, did not allow literature to be defeated by ideology.
Source: Rocznik Komparatystyczny
Author: Joanna Kamień
Institution: University of Gdańsk
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4382583734