The Department of Russian and Slavic Studies invites you to the third of a series of four job talks in Russian Literature.
Featuring Dr. Rebecca Stanton, Columbia University and Queens College (CUNY)
In his Faustian novel The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov draws on two supernatural narratives that exist in multiple, canonical retellings: the Gospels and the Faust myth. The plot twist that unites them, in which the "true" story of Jesus's trial and execution is revealed by a devil on a Mephistophelean visit to Moscow, arouses a host of deeply culturally embedded demonological suspicions about the occult power of literature itself -- suspicions mirrored by Soviet literary theory, which ascribed transformative powers to literature while simultaneously accusing Formalist critics of "superstition" and "idealism." This talk positions Bulgakov's novel in the Faust tradition dating back to the 16th century, and examines how Bulgakov uses this tradition to explore the interrelationships among knowledge, text, and power in post-Revolutionary Russia.