MASTER A ND M ARGARITA :A LITERARY A UTOBIOGRAPHY?

The dialectics of a triad—the author, his creation, and the surrounding reality—is the focus of this essay, which aims to discover how much of his soul Mikhail Bulgakov put into his famous opus, Master and Margarita. The author’s mind becomes a bifurcation point between his work and reality, a kind of Borgesian Aleph, where causality might change direction and where the border between the Kantian ‘thing in itself ’ and phenomena disappears. Though Stalin was keenly interested in Bulgakov’s work, the latter’s attempt to play Seneca’s role near Emperor Nero was mercilessly crushed. Still, one of the writer’s prophecies regarding the Jewish fate, symbolised in the novel by a Yom Kippur rooster, very nearly came true 13 years after his death.