Unmasking the Impostors or a Tale of Two Doubles

: A Revisionist Reading of Dostoevskii's Father Zosima and Bulgakov's Margarita

Abstract

The cult-like figures of Dostoevskii’s Zosima and Bulgakov’s Margarita have attracted substantial scholarly and popular attention, some less critical than it should be. However, the current approaches to Zosima as the Grand Inquisitor’s Christian antithesis fail to explain completely the socialist aspect of Zosima’s religious teachings, keeping the long-standing issue concerning the exact nature of Zosima’s religion alive. Likewise, readings of Margarita as a figure of faithful love fall short of explaining her recurring parallels with Pilate, a figure of betrayal in Bulgakov’s novel. This thesis offers a revisionist reading of these two characters, unmasking Zosima and Margarita as impostors and the Grand Inquisitor’s and Pilate’s doubles.
Such an approach builds on the work of scholars such as Carol Apollonio, who has called for reading Dostoevskii “against the grain.” In exposing the impostors, I rely on an alternative intellectual genealogy grounded in early conceptions of Zosima as a mouthpiece for socialism and Barkov’s unpopular reading of Margarita as the agent of the Master’s betrayal. Taking a cue from these readers, I place—for the first time—Zosima and Margarita into dialogue via Dostoevskii’s paradigm of socialism as a betrayal of Christianity. Employing an (inter)text-based methodology, I show that the answer to the question of Zosima’s religion and Margarita’s identifications with Pilate lies not in the binary opposition between socialism and Christianity, betrayal and faith but in their very intersections, bringing a new angle to the well-recognized continuities between Dostoevskii’s and Bulgakov’s novels.

Date of Award	9 May 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Andreas X Schonle (Supervisor) & Connor Brian Doak (Supervisor)