A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia Jay Nordlinger
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/a-stalin-era-story-roiling-russia/
The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic, becomes a movie
It’s a miracle,” everyone says. It’s a miracle that Michael Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita made it to Russian screens. It’s a further miracle that the adaptation, this movie, has stayed there (so far). Among those who use the word “miracle” is Lockshin himself.
He is the director, and The Master and Margarita? That’s the classic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer who lived from 1891 to 1940. He worked on the novel from 1928 until his death. In 1930, he burned his manuscript. Then he started again. The novel could not be published during his lifetime. Stalin would not have liked it. It was published decades after Bulgakov’s death, with the first complete version appearing in 1973.
Maybe the most famous line of the book is “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Bulgakov may have picked this up from Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus cries, “I’ll burn my books!” (but it is not so simple). There is a lot of the Faust legend in The Master and Margarita: Goethe, certainly. There is even a character named “Berlioz.” (Hector Berlioz composed a kind of oratorio — which can also be staged as an opera — called “The Damnation of Faust.”)
So, that’s what The Master and Margarita is about? A pact with the devil? What the novel is about is a complicated, not really answerable question. Michael Lockshin puts it amusingly, in a conversation with me: “Ask ten Bulgakov scholars what the novel is about, and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask a hundred, and you’ll get a hundred.”
The book has a devil character, yes. (His name is “Woland” and he pays a visit to Moscow, entourage in tow.) The book deals with religion and irreligion. There is a love story. There are various stories, interweaving.
Regardless, everyone can agree on this: The novel depicts the condition of the artist under dictatorship — the life that Bulgakov was living. The life that many were living. Lockshin’s film adaptation depicts the same.
(The film, I should note, bears the same title as the novel.)
Some artists choose to be independent — defiant — sacrificing a great deal. Some are reliable toadies of the regime. Some live in a moral gray area, doing what it takes to survive, day by day. And if you have to cooperate with the regime — so be it. If you have to do a little snitching, a little informing — so be it. You may get the apartment of the guy you have informed on.
The movie that Lockshin made could never be made today, Lockshin tells me. Could not be made in Russia, that is. It was made in 2021, before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After the invasion, the Kremlin clamped down severely on Russian society. What freedom of action existed, closed.
We will return to these matters shortly.
Michael Lockshin was born in 1981, in the United States. In 1986, his father, Arnold Lockshin, moved the family to the Soviet Union. Arnold Lockshin was a scientist — a biochemist — and a believer in things Soviet. The Lockshins’ arrival in Moscow made a splash around the world. This merits an article unto its own.
So, Michael grew up in the Soviet Union and then Russia. He did not dream of being a film director. But he allows this: “If I had a ‘superpower’ as a kid, it was observation.” He first read The Master and Margarita when he was 15. It was assigned in school. He loved the book. He has pored over it since, getting fresh understandings.
He went to Moscow State University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology. He then moved to London. He later bounced between London and Berlin. And Moscow. He traveled all over Europe, directing commercials, primarily.
In 2019, he made a movie, a feature film: The Silver Skates, adapting the story of Hans Brinker. It is a Russian movie. Highly acclaimed, it won a slew of awards and became the first Netflix Originals movie in the Russian language.
These days, everyone wants to know about identity: Who are you, what are you, how do you feel? I put this question to Michael Lockshin: Does he feel American, Russian, some blend? “It’s a complex question,” he says. Life has blown him hither and yon. He is aware that people don’t like the term, in our fervently nationalist age, “but I do kind of think the best term for me is ‘cosmopolite.’” He knows Russian culture, he knows American culture. He has significant experience elsewhere. He views himself as a one-man melting pot.
Bulgakov, he notes, was a worldly man, who spoke five languages. And the movie has an international cast. Woland, for instance, is played by August Diehl, the German actor. The Master and Margarita is a beloved book in Russia, but it is also part of world culture. From this broader culture, Russia now seems to have withdrawn, says Lockshin. Putin has “isolated” the country.
Over the years, there have been various adaptations of The Master and Margarita, in various countries, in various languages. Miniseries for television; arthouse films. But not until now has there been a proper feature film. A big movie. Producers in Russia had long held the rights to the novel. It was in 2019 that they asked Lockshin to direct. He did not take on the assignment lightly. Far from it.
His thinking went something like this: Everyone in Russia knows this novel — loves this novel. What if I screw it up? They’ll burn me at the stake. Also: How do you do justice to this novel, with its multiple storylines? How do you put it all onscreen? On top of that: Much of Bulgakov’s novel depends on his prose — his extraordinary prose, down to the punctuation. The novel is not necessarily plot-driven. How does a filmmaker proceed?
Lockshin found a way. He did not try to put the whole novel on the screen. He put elements of it into a “three-act structure,” as he says. Et voilà.
He and his team shot the movie from July to October in 2021. The cast included some starry actors — the aforementioned Diehl, yes, but also others, such as Yevgeny Tsyganov and Yuliya Snigir. They play the title characters, the Master and Margarita. (And they are married in real life.) (A more beautiful woman than Snigir does not appear on any movie screen.)
After filming was complete, Lockshin returned to the United States, to edit the movie. I say “returned” because Lockshin had been making the U.S. his home base in recent years. His plan was to travel to Russia in a few months — sometime in early 2022. There was post-production to do. In February, Putin launched his full-scale invasion.
Lockshin spoke out on social media. He criticized the invasion and expressed support for the invaded. Like anyone else, he could have self-censored — kept mum. But conscience compelled him to do otherwise.
Needless to say, he did not travel to Russia. He could not have (without dire consequences).
The movie was supposed to come out on the last day of 2022. That day came and went. The release date kept being put off. From what Lockshin knows, there was a debate about whether to censor the movie or block it altogether. In the end, the movie was released, essentially as made. Why? Lockshin can speculate.
While the movie was being shot, in 2021, there was considerable publicity about it. The movie was widely anticipated. The Master and Margarita is a touchstone in Russia. And if the movie got buried, wouldn’t that embarrass the government, given the themes of the movie?
An article in the New York Times, by Paul Sonne, put it this way: “Banning a production of Russia’s most famous literary paean to artistic freedom was perhaps too big an irony for even the Kremlin to bear.”
The movie came out on January 25, 2024. There had been very little of the usual promotion. Lockshin’s name was omitted from posters. His name was absent from all marketing materials, such as they were. In any event, the movie was a sensation. The public went to see it, quickly making it the top-grossing Russian movie of all time, in the over-18 category.
Furious, the state and its propagandists got to work. As Lockshin says, “a whole campaign” was launched against him and the movie. Propagandists called him a “criminal” and a “terrorist,” and demanded that the movie be pulled from cinemas. The issue even reached the Duma (which passes for a Russian parliament). How could this movie have been made? Who is responsible?
Vladimir Solovyov denounced the movie for its “sharp, anti-Soviet, anti–modern-Russia theme.” Solovyov is maybe the most grotesque of the Kremlin propagandists, a fixture on television. He called for a “serious investigation” into the film’s release.
Obviously, Kremlin officials and assorted mouthpieces see themselves in the movie. How could they not?
Lockshin says he knows, to a certainty, that there were “real conversations, real discussions,” about pulling the movie from theaters — just three or four days after the movie came out. Yet it has stayed. Why? Again, Lockshin can speculate.
More than a million people saw the movie in just the first few days. (That number is up to five and a half million, as of this writing.) The movie was a trending topic on the Internet (censored though the Internet is). Maybe pulling the movie was more trouble than it was worth?
By all accounts, people have found it a moving experience, seeing The Master and Margarita. Some say that the mere act of going to see it is a “silent dissent.” There are lots of anecdotes from and about moviegoers. I have one to share myself. I talked to a young Russian woman in New York whose mother, back home, had seen the movie. Her mother had been “overwhelmed,” she said. “I had never known her to react that way to anything cultural.”
The story onscreen parallels life in Russia today. On March 12, a headline from Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile, read, “Police search the homes of artists and activists across Russia.” Lockshin says, “There are playwrights and theater directors in jail right now. There are artists in jail right now for making anti-war statements” — even general statements about war, as opposed to specific criticisms or condemnations. “It’s a very scary time.”
Many have fled the country. Many more would, if it were feasible. As Lockshin points out, people may have elderly parents. They may have several school-age kids. They may not speak another language. Not everyone can just pick up and leave.
As in Soviet times — as in all “fear societies,” to borrow Natan Sharansky’s phrase — some are accommodating themselves to the state. Some who have been critical of the government have recanted, abjectly. Lockshin’s producers distanced themselves from him — but that was not enough to keep them in the good graces of the Russian Cinema Fund. They have been denied the right to apply for funding, indefinitely.
And here is something that people have noted — including a Soviet-born American, who pointed it out to me: Two of the actors who portray Kremlin lackeys in The Master and Margarita are themselves Kremlin lackeys — or at least mouth the official line. (What is in their hearts, who knows? Maybe even they don’t know.)
I ask Michael Lockshin whether people — his colleagues, his friends — have been afraid to contact him. He is, after all, an official pariah, an official villain. “I would say there are people in Russia who are cautious about it,” he answers.
Another question — blunt: Does he fear for his personal safety? No, not in the United States. But returning to Russia is out of the question. There are other countries he must avoid as well. (Presumably, countries whose governments are friendly to Putin.)
Right now, Lockshin is working on a couple of English-language scripts. “I don’t see myself making anything in Russian until the regime changes,” he says. Before we say goodbye, I ask him what Mikhail Bulgakov would think of the movie and the reaction to it — by Kremlin and public alike. Bulgakov would not be surprised, the answer is. He would find it awfully familiar.
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