Abstract

The dissertation explores Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita through the prism of the Russian Silver Age, specifically focusing on the philosophical and religious concerns of Russian Symbolism and the eclectic thought of the theologian and philosopher, Pavel Florenskii. By using such an approach, the thesis clarifies the novel's complex narrative structure, Bulgakov's strategic use of the fantastic, and the novel's highly unorthodox neo-Platonic worldview, all of which have left previous critics divided over essential meaning and genre. The novel is a vital and organic part of Russian culture which contains within itself important religio-philosophic positions grounded in the idealistic mysticism and aesthetics of pre-revolutionary Russia. Like the binary cultural model described by the semioticians Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, Bulgakov's novel is a "storehouse of texts" which also serves as a generative mechanism, giving birth to a new text, a new philosophical and aesthetic system. Its contents differed drastically from the accepted worldview and aesthetics for the period during which the novel was written . The symbiotic relationship between the aesthetic architectonic literary system and culture at large was important to Russian Symbolist circles, and later became a central component of Mikhail Bakhtin's thought. The language, imagery, mythopoesis, and intertextuality of The Master and Margarita correspond to this approach to literature, and such a correspondence helps to locate the novel in the twentieth-century canon and within Russian intellectual history