The Taganka's Master

The spring of 1977... A tranquil, poor, and stable life in a country where it seems nothing ever changes and nothing ever will... A general secretary descending into senility... Lines for sausage... Four television stations, each essentially showing the same fare... Senseless discussions about a new constitution... Jamming stations unable to block the voice of foreign radio broadcasts... Czechoslovakia has long since been forgotten, and, for another three years, Afghanistan will remain just another foreign country of little interest to anybody. 

All is quiet. But in Moscow, there is a place next to the Taganskaya metro station that everyone is talking about, even those who have never been there. Amazing plays are being staged in this theater, unlike anything seen before. The idol of the entire country – Vladimir Vysotsky – is performing here. Tickets are impossible to come by. In order to get in, you have to belong to the intellectual elite… or be a dentist (good dentists were hard to find); or perhaps be a Communist Party boss, who by day denounces these plays during official meetings, and by night takes the family to see them. Or you have to be a student, ready to sweep the entire theater in exchange for a chance to see the performances; or a theater fanatic, constantly cadging extra tickets by the entrance of the revered building. 

Today, when there are so many competing forms of entertainment and you can have tickets to any show delivered to your door (presuming you have the money to pay for them), how can we understand what the Taganka Theater meant to us then? A legend, a dream, an unattainable ideal. 

I was in my first year at the university, and an evening spent at the Taganka – after an hour in front of the theater scrounging a ticket or a lengthy and rather unskilled effort at sweeping the foyer – was a joy that my girlfriends and I would remember and mull over for a very, very long time. We knew how hard it was for Lyubimov’s plays to get past the censor, and we would ecstatically trade rumors about how yet another party boss trying to ban the latest production had been wrapped around Yuri Petrovich’s little finger. 

And now there was a new sensation: Lyubimov was staging The Master and Margarita. It is hard for people today to understand what Bulgakov’s novel meant to people in the 1970s. Today, The Master and Margarita is included in school curricula, it is read by fans of fantasy literature, it is sold in supermarkets next to Paulo Coelho, where (Bulgakov devotees and my own young self will have to forgive me) it now seems to me it belongs. But 30 years ago there were very few novels capable of leaving a more profound impression on me. I would venture that this feeling was shared by many.

The Master and Margarita was shrouded, perhaps, by an aura of even greater mystery than the Taganka Theater. Its popularity, to a large extent, was intertwined with the mythology that had arisen around it: the book that Bulgakov had slaved over for many years before suddenly throwing his manuscript into a fire and then resuming work on it; the manuscript that was preserved by the master’s widow, but remained unknown to readers for several decades; the novel, first printed in the Soviet Union in 1966 in the journal Moskva, and even then only in an abridged edition. 

This issue of the journal quickly became a bibliographic gem. The novel about the devil and Christ, about Moscow in the late 1920s and early 1930s, about the tragic fate and secret love of an artist, instantly became the number one read for the Russian intelligentsia. Another seven years passed before a complete edition of the book was finally printed in the USSR. That huge edition sold out in no time, and just as it would later be impossible to get tickets to the Taganka without superhuman efforts, it was impossible to get the Bulgakov volume that included The Master and Margarita. 

There was, however, a place where this book stood on shelves for the taking – the Beryozka bookstores, which only accepted hard currency. But visiting one of these establishments was a terrifying and pointless experience. Almost nobody from among Bulgakov’s fans had ever laid eyes on foreign currency, and if they did happen to acquire some, they would have no desire to get near a Beryozka after hearing the stories – some true, and some fantasy – about what would happen to you if you set foot in a hard currency store with dollars in your wallet.

But all was not lost. Nineteen seventy-seven was right around the corner (and not 1937, thank God). It was possible to buy Bulgakov’s work on the black market, to find it in libraries, to borrow it from more fortunate friends, or to receive it as a gift from some visiting foreigner. And now it would even be possible to see Bulgakov’s heroes on the stage.

In those days, it was a rare week that my friends and I did not make several visits to Taganka. We tended to be lucky in our hunt for extra tickets, and we often managed to get inside. Rumors about what was going on backstage were not hard to come by. The production was in the final stages of rehearsal. I had a stroke of incredible good luck. My father was invited to a dress rehearsal and brought me with him. This was my first opportunity to see Woland and Yeshua on the stage. During these first run-throughs, the actors still were not even sure how to pronounce Jesus’ historical name. Holding my breath along with the rest of the audience, I watched as the heavy, dark curtain from Hamlet moved across the stage to the grand music of Edison Denisov, marveling as Zinaida Slavina, who played Azazello, breathed fire (during this early performance she was still having a little trouble hiding the bottle with flammable liquid – later she would become a virtuoso at it). And I will never forget how Veniamin Smekhov, in the role of Woland – with Prokofiev’s music in the background and pronouncing the words “manuscripts do not burn” – presents the restored text of the Master’s novel. This was the beginning of my love for this play.

When Lyubimov was not given funding for his production, he decided to use scenery from previous plays. This turned into an amazing theatrical technique – the play incorporated allusions to Lyubimov’s previous masterpieces, which became organic components of his new creation. Hamlet’s curtain suggested the forces of fate or divine will; the pendulum from Rush Hour [Час пик] represented the march of time, from which only Woland and Yeshua were free; the toy alphabet blocks from the play Listen [Послушайте], about Mayakovsky, were suddenly turned so that the Cyrillic letters ХВ (Христос Воскрес, or “Christ has Risen”) faced the audience; the golden frame, which stood in for the golden cage in Tartuffe, became the palace where Pontius Pilate underwent his torments…

I could not always count on parental connections, or in any event my inexhaustible desire to see the play went beyond their resources. So I started my endless vigil near the theater, first during the preliminary stagings for party bigwigs. Crowds of people lay siege to the theater entrance, the boldest of them entreating actors to sneak them in through the stage door. This seemed most “fitting” on those occasions when the play was being previewed by some party boss. We were viewed as a bunch of nut cases. Kindly Zinaida Slavina wanted to help: “Try squeezing in along with those who have tickets...”

All of Lyubimov’s plays were subjected to grueling censorship – he was forced to mangle and abridge his creations. In the case of The Master and Margarita, however, the director was incredibly lucky and he managed to outsmart the authorities with his brash fervor, convincing them that the play had been authorized (“By whom? Well, everyone knows that I’m rehearsing it…”) and managed to release it practically without cuts. The commission in charge of preserving Bulgakov’s literary legacy also played a role here. The intelligentsia came to the defense of both of its idols. 

The play was opened and tickets were put on sale. That did not make it any easier to get in. Still, thousands of people did manage to see it. Many of them had not read Bulgakov and they missed a lot of what was happening on the stage, thinking that the play had ended after the second act and shrugging their shoulders in bewilderment. Nevertheless, they left the theater in a state of enchantment, not only because they had seen the play that everyone dreamed of seeing, but from their encounter with greatness and wonder.

“Manuscripts do not burn,” exclaimed Bulgakov’s Woland. Lyubimov was urged to end the play with this phrase. “They burn, and how,” he countered, “And so do their authors...” How lucky we are that Bulgakov’s novel did, indeed, survive. How lucky we are that the play has also survived and that is has been performed more than a thousand times over the last 30 years. Today it probably leaves a different impression. For me it is enough to recall those eight magical evenings when I watched this play during my days as a young student, gripped by theater-mania.