Depicting the Divine: Mikhail Bulgakov and Thomas Mann

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Two of the iconic novels of the twentieth century, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928-40) and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), each engage with religious themes in the face of militant, sometimes violent, cultural opposition: Soviet communism and Nazi anti-Semitism. They have divine characters, Jesus and Yahweh, and draw upon modern developments in biblical study, emphasising scripture as texts subject to literary criticism. Yet, as Voronina shows, Mann and Bulgakov employ a deliberately contradictory narrative strategy, de-mystifying and de-sacralising their divine protagonists but leaving the existence of the transcendent open. In this way, doubt becomes both a dramatisation of faith and a strategy for approaching the divine.

Olga G. Voronina received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University College London. She has taught at the Universities of Leeds, Nottingham, St Andrews, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London and University College Oxford.