Alfred Barkov

English > The novel > Interpretations > Alfred Barkov

Most readers of The Master and Margarita agree that Bulgakov himself was the real prototype of the Master, and his third wife Elena Sergeevna was the source of inspiration for the character of Margarita. Someone who is without any doubt in a class of his own as far as the interpretations of The Master and Margarita are concerned, is the Ukrainian filologist and radio amateur Alfred Nikolayevich Barkov, according to whom the above mentioned interpretation is completely wrong, and who has a very particular, and most detailed vision on the novel.

In 1994 polemicist Alfred Barkov published a book of 300 pages: Роман М.А. Булгакова "Мастер и Маргарита": альтернативное прочтение ("M.A. Bulgakov's novel 'The Master and Margarita': an alternative reading"), a feat of strength which he repeated in 1996 with another essay: Роман М.А. Булгакова 'Мастер и Маргарита': 'верно-вечная' любовь или литературная мистификация? ("M.A. Bulgakov's novel 'The Master and Margarita': an everlasting love or a literary mystification?"). In both occasions he ranted and raved heavily against the "erroneous" opinion that Bulgakov was thinking of himself when describing the Master, and that Bulgakov's spouse Elena Sergeevna was the source of inspiration for Margarita. According to Barkov this interpretation would not corresond with the true content of the book and the real intentions of the author. Moreover, he considered this opinion as a "traditional pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin presentation".

This was not Barkov's first attempt. Before that, he had been engaged in heavy controversies about the "true content" of the theatre plays Hamlet of William Shakespeare and Yevgeny Onegin of Alexander Pushkin, and he was defending categoric points of view that went right into the teeth of more common opinions. And his public quarrels with chest grandmaster Garry Kasparov about intelligence and intellect still vibrate heavily on many Ukrainean internet pages.

As far as The Master and Margarita is concerned, Barkov says that the various studies of Bulgakov's work refuse to see the subtile hints in the novel to real situations, and consequently don't understand the satire. And especially the non-Russians can never understand it because the hints are so subtile that no translation can ever catch them. Meanwhile, Barkov's own language was not very subtile, by the way. Anyone with dissenting views was called "pretentious" and "deceiving", and his own interpretation he called, on the English version of his website: the true content. And modestly he continued: "Actually, this is the very first work containing an attempt to reveal the 'secret key' to the inner structure of the masterpieces created by Shakespeare, Pushkin, and Bulgakov".

Anyway, Barkov advances the thesis that The Master and Margarita is a parody of the theatre play Faust and the City. This play was written by Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (1875-1933), the chief of the People's Commissariat for Education, Enlightenment and Sciences from 1917 to 1929. In that play Lunacharsky sketches an interesting sequel of the famous Faust story written by Goethe. He starts from the last scene in Goethe's tragedy and shows Faust as the enlightened ruler over the land he conquered from the sea. The people under Faust's rule are ready to free themselves from despotism, so there is a revolution. Faust is happy with this evolution because he sees it as the realisation of an old dream - free people in a free world. Lunacharsky presents a social revolution as the start of a new historical era.

Despite this ode to freedom in his play, it was Lunacharsky who organized, as a People's Commissar, the first campaigns of censorship in the Soviet Union and he was heavily opposed to Bulgakov. In 1928 he delivered a speech on the Central Comittee of the Communist Party in which he called Bulgakov "the worst anti-Soviet author". According to Barkov Lunacharsky himself was Bulgakov's source of inspiration for two characters in The Master and Margarita: the critic Latunsky, and Arkadi Sempleyarov, the self-satisfied chairman of the Acoustics Commission of the Moscow theatres.

Barkov describes much more prototypes from the novel and he focusses on the environment of the Moscow Art Theatre, the MKHAT. To him, the MKHAT itself is the prototype of the Variety Theatre, although the Moscow Music Hall, which was situated right next to Bolshaya Sadovaya number 10 is a much more obvious choice and corresponds better to the description in the novel. The characters of Grigori Rimsky en Ivan Varenukha are, according to Barkov, based on Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1859–1943), the founding fathers of the MKHAT. Koroviev would be a parody of Vasily Ivanovich Kachalov (1875-1948), an actor of the MKHAT, and the female vampire Hella would be based on Olga Sergeevna Bokshanskaya (1891-1948). Olga Sergeevna was the sister of Bulgakov's wife Elena Sergeevna and the personal assistant of MKHAT-director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Bulgakov didn't always get along with his sister-in-law, but yet shehad typed an important part of the text of The Master and Margarita in the spring of 1938.

So far there's not much to argue against Barkov's analysis. Other analysts suggest other prototypes for Latunsky and Sempleyarov but that's not surprising - it's absolutely normal that in a satire criticizing a political system, characteristics of different protagonists of the system are bundled in one character. But often it seems that Barkov's sole objective is to make conflicting statements, as a principle.

The way Barkov analyses the text of The Master and Margarita to come to his conclusions is sometimes rather strange, though it may be interesting to become acquainted with it.

A good example is the endless plea which Barkov holds to prove that the Koroviev character is the narrator in The Master and Margarita. One can ask why he spent so considerable effort upon it, but we'll talk about that later. Let us first look at one of the many reasonings he follows to prove it. What follows is just an arbitrary grasp in the material. When the Master starts telling the story of his awakening love to Ivan when they meet in professor Stravinsky's hospital, there are three successive paragraphs, all on the same page, starting with more or less the same phrase. In the English translation (1979 - Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) they sound like this: "Ivan learned that the master and the unknown woman…", "Ivan learned that his guest and his secret wife…" and "Ivan learned from the guest's story how the lovers…". Barkov calls this a styllistic lapse. And an important one because, if the narrator was Bulgakov himself, it would be, according to Barkov, nothing less than an "artistic catastrophy". So he concludes: this styllistic lapse can only come from someone with a low educational level but who is, by the amount of knowledge he appears to have, close enough to the leading character of the book. So it must be Korovyev, a member of Woland's retinue.

To argue this further he gathers - in a very selective way - more statements and excerpts from the novel's text. But why is he doing this? Well, with this collection of citations Barkov sets out what he calls a "language zone". That's a quite homogeneous and harmonious aggregate of excerpts with the same level of phraseology, grammatical characteristics and figures of speech. And, I have to admit, the collection which Barkov builts up to define the narrators language zone is impressive and corresponds pretty well to Koroviev's language zone. At least in some fragments. Because, probably for his own convenience, he "forgot" to include in the defined language zone a number of statements by which the narrator actually shows a much higher level of education. So Barkov puts considerable effort in proving that Korovyev is the narrator. He spends almost the full second quarter of his 300 pages plea on it. One could wonder why, but that will become clear later on. Let's first have a look at his other conclusions.

According to Barkov the Woland character was based on Vladimir Lenin. For proving this he refers to other "Professors" whoe appeared in previous novels of Bulgakov like The Fatal Eggs and Heart of the Dog, and to many other details like, for instance, the fact that Woland would have difficulties to pronounce the letter "V", which would be a speech impediment from which Lenin also suffered - speech impedement? Well... we'll come back to this too later on.

Furthermore, still according to Barkov, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) - whose real name was Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov - was the source of inspiration for the Master. Gorky, who had lived as an exile in Italy for a while, was called back by Stalin and appointed as the first chairman of the so-called Союз Советских Писателей (Soyuz Sovyetskikh Pisateley) or Union of Soviet Writers. This union was created in 1932 and all the other writers' associations - like the Российская Ассоциация Пролетарских Писателей (RAPP) or Russian Association of Proletarian Writers - were abolished. The membership was accessible to all writers - including critics and translators - who were "striving for the realisation of the socialist reality". Non-partymembers could also qualify as so-called попутчики (poputshiki) or fellow-travellers. At the first congress, in 1934, the Social Realism was proclaimed as the only essential artistic working method. As from 1934-1935 it was almost impossible for non-members to publish their work. Until his death in 1936 Gorky was systematically called "master" by the communist party newspaper Pravda.

As a consequence of this opinion Margarita's character would have been a prostitute, hired by the "dark forces" to charm the Master. For this thesis Barkov refers to Maria Fyodorovna Yurkovskaya (1868-1953), an actress of the MKHAT using the pseudonym Maria Andreeva. Before the revolution, when the bolsheviks were still operating in the underground, she was one of Vladimir Lenin's assistants, comparable to Hella for Woland in the novel. From 1918 to 1921 Maria Andreeva was Commissar for Theatres and Public Spectacles in Petrograd, and from 1931 to 1948 she was Director of the House of Sciences in Moscow. It is said that it was on Lenin's orders that Maria Andreeva "recruted" the talented writer Gorky to serve the bolsheviks. Barkov was not really font of Maria Andreeva, as is shown in his following description: "When this beautiful woman was fourteen, she entertained herself with cutting cats' throats".

Barkov really didn't like Margarita. According to him, she had betrayed the Master, just like the prostitute Niza lured Judas to his murderers in the biblical story. Barkov proves his these on the fact that Margarita leaves the Master in the basement saying "that she was expected, that she must bow to necessity", after which he was arrested. It is clear to Barkov that this shows her contacts with the secret police and that Margarita betrayed the Master. For the sake of convenience Barkov forgets that in the novel is unveiled that the Master was betrayed by Aloisy Mogarych, the "friend" of the Master who wanted to take over his basement, and who had to justify himself for this at Woland's after the ball. And here it becomes clear why Barkov needed to identify Koroviev as the narrator of the story. Because, if this accomplice of the Devil, this professional liar, is the narrator, then all passages which don't comply with Barkov's theory - and there are many f such passages! - can be called attempts of a born liar to veil the truth. "Just like we can observe it in the works of Shakespeare and Pushkin, the biased language of the narrator is deliberately intended to indoctrinate the readers with a false perception of the true content", Brakov writes. H'm...

But all right... what else did Barkov discover? Well, that Matthew Levi was based on Leo Tolstoi and that Bulgakov would have played a role in his own novel, not as the Master though, but as Ivan Bezdomny in the hospital. Bulgakov would have been addicted to morphine himself in the 20's and 30's, and his third wife Elena Sergeevna would have helped him to get the drugs. The visit of the Master - Lenin thus - to Ivan - Bulgakov thus - would then be an allegory of a brainwashing. Which would be an explanation why the Master had the keys of the hospital. The dark power would have sent the Master to Ivan. Barkov founds this theorie by hints interwoven in the text by Bulgakov himself. Before his injection Ivan is always called by his name and patronymicum - de respectful Russian rule of etiquette -, but after that he's called "Ivanushka", the fool, the jester, the nitwit.

Just one more observation on Elena Sergevyena: according to Barkov she was an informant of the secret police who had to report on Bulgakov. He comes to this conclusion, again only indirectly, from reports of the secret police that have been made public later.

Of course it is fun to observe how a man finds evidence to justify a theory by intense and sustained research, often in very small details. But one could wonder if, at such level of details, he can distance himself sufficiently. It seems that Barkov, by searching for details, doesn't see the more obvious and visible clues, needing less coils to fit or, worse, that he ignores them consciously. Alfred Nikolayevich Barkov antagonized many Russian literary researchers with his theories. No great matter as such, of course, because shaking someone awake keeps him alert.

But some of Barkov's own followers try to exceed their master and are really going too far. On the website of the BBC - yes, the famous and respectable British Broadcast Corporation - I found explicit links to Barkov to prove that the Woland character is inspired by Lenin with the following argument: "Not only is Woland [...] bearded, he also has difficulty in pronouncing the letter "V", a speech impediment from which Lenin also suffered."

So... "bearded"?!?" One of the first descriptions of Bulgakov about Woland is выбрит гладко or, in English, clean-shaven. And about this speech impediment : one of the names of the devil in the many German variants of the Faust legend is indeed Voland, but that's no reason to suggest a speech impediment, because Woland is also very common. And so are Valand, Faland and Wieland. In Russian language the names Voland and Woland are written in the same way - as Воланд. I couldn't find any information on a possible speech impediment of Lenin. Except maybe that some sources suggest that he died of syphilis. In its third stadium this illness can cause dementia paralytica, of which one of the possible symptoms is speech disorder. But this is quite speculative. Sure is that in March 1923, after his third stroke, Lenin lost his ability to speak forever.

In November 2003 Barkov promised to do his utmost to publish his disclosures on the internet in English as soon as possible. He will never be able to keep his promises, When I was in Ukraine in 2004 and tried to contact him, I heard that he died earlier that year, on January 4, 2004.

Source - Alfred Nikolayevtch Barkov, Роман Михаила Булгакова "Мастер и Маргарита": альтернативное прочтение, Tekhna, Kiev, 1994, 298 p. - ISBN 5770770643.



Share this page |