8/ CHRONICLESnVIEWSnTHOUGHTS ON MIKHAIL BULGAKOVnby Leon SteinmetznIalways think of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov with tenderness,nas if he were my relative, and a very close and dear onenat that. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was not my relative. Inwas not even fortunate to know him personally — he died a fewnyears before I was born.nOnce, in a conversation with the editor of this magazine, thenname Bulgakov came up. My interlocutor, who had read annEnglish translation of The Master and Margarita, as well asnsome of Bulgakov’s plays, spoke of him with great respect, andnthen asked: “But still, why do you say that one must readnBulgakov?” This essay is my modest attempt to answer thatnquestion.nBesides that. The Master and Margarita, the novel whichnLeon Steinmetz teaches writing at Harvard. His essays havenappeared in Commentary and National Review. His shortnstory “A Child’s Joke” in the May 1987 issue opened ournfiction section.nnnBulgakov considered to be the most important thing in his lifen(he died in 1940 at the age of 48), which he, even gravely ill,nblind, continued dictating to his wife until, literally, his lastndays; the novel, in which the visit of Soviet Moscow by thenSpirits of Darkness intertwines with the story of Jesus ofnNazareth—this novel is currently being produced at thenavant-garde American Repertory Theater by the famous Sovietndissident-modernist-director (the words can be put in anynorder) Mr. Yuri Lyubimov. But about this later.n* * 5i<nPeople who knew Bulgakov personally remember him as a verynkind and lighthearted man. The idea that a true artistic geniusncannot fail to be a good man sounds now hopelessly oldfashioned.nThe misanthropy of Baudelaire, the cynicism ofnDuchamp, the professional dishonesty of Mayakovsky, or thenhooliganism of Pollock seem to be the natural attributes ofncontemporary genius — defying everything and everyone, concentratingnexclusively on himself, his conscience or subconscience,na rebel and a loner.nBut let’s pause for a moment and contemplate what, afternall, artistic genius is. Michelangelo, when he said that a greatnsculpture already exists in a block of marble, and the task of thensculptor is simply to remove, chip away the unneeded piecesnand “free” it, was not entirely joking.nAnd like this Michelangelo’s sculpture concealed in a blocknof marble, perhaps, beautiful images, divine sounds and voices,nprofound ideas exist around us, unseen and unheard bynus — ordinary mortals. A genius, like a supersensitive antenna,npicks them up, translates them into our language, embodiesnthem into visible forms, and hands them to us.nThe main impulse of a true genius is not to look intonhimself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconsciencen— as Pasternak said, “conscience is like the headlightsnof a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way,ndirected inward leads to catastrophe”—but to look out ofnhimself And to give. And if the main impulse of your existencenis the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character.nThat’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimednin his Mozart and Salieri: “Genius and villainy arenincompatible.”nBy education Bulgakov was a physician. After graduatingnfrom the Kiev University Medical School, he went to work in anremote provincial village, and there, in that godforsaken place,nfar from the big cities, far from, as he wrote, “opera, streetn