The Master and Margarita (Mistrz i Malgorzata)

Manuscripts do not burn" - no doubt the most famous statement in 20th century Russian literature - was made by the devil. The statement comes from another world, offering more than a simple hope, but a form of serenely irrational faith, the certainty that something in the creation of a work of art can stand up to all the forces of destruction in this world, that a certain truth, or perhaps a spiritual order, could remain indomitably immune to the effects of any and every attempt to eliminate or stifle it, even surviving the doubts and weaknesses of the Master bearing the truth. This extravagant aphorism attributed to a man who dared write to Stalin saying "I am a mystical writer", is found in a novel which was destined to cross the path of Krystian Lupa. For years now the Polish stage director has been addressing the novel form as a major form for expressing a crisis still assailing our age. Examples can be seen with his productions based on the The Man without Qualities, The Brothers Karamazov, Sleepwalkers and Extinction; the last three were acclaimed at the Odéon theatre, attracting ever larger audiences fascinated by the aspirations and demands of his vision. The Master and Margarita is a natural addition to the series; it has been adapted for thirty-six actors from the Stary Teatr company and is presented with a few simple props set on a stage which itself is subtly without boundaries. But there is more: the corpus of works chosen by Lupa has Bulgakov's masterpiece at the centre as the text most closely linked to the art of the theatre. Here is the last margin of freedom for a man of the theatre whose career and work were destroyed by Stalin's dictatorship and who embraced the universe of the novel to use it freely as a stage, scaling it to his imagination, the only stage which could save his writing from being shipwrecked in the chaos of his time. The Master and Margarita should not, however, be seen merely as the laboratory for an artist who had been deprived of an audience, for this dream-like or carnival-like fable is also an introspective study and the ending is far from triumphant. What hope is there for a world where poets burn their words and where the devil has to intervene to save them?