Boulgakov
oil on canvas (1988), 69” x 80”,  172cm x 200cm

It isn’t strange that Pogrebinsky would have painted this composition, especially in the late 1980s.  Boulgakov had been an underground writer of perhaps genius talents.  He was born, like the artist, in Kiev to a long line of priests and White Russians, he lived to see the atrocity of the tsarist regime, through wars and extreme poverty, and he lived to see the terror of the Soviet regime, through repression and censorship.    Towards the end of his life he worked on The Master and Margarita, a metaphysical work of fiction.   The novel has been called one of the greatest works of the twentieth century, especially for its ability to seek out and question the purpose of the artist in this modern century of blood and death.    His often tragic and hilarious depiction of Soviet life in the 1930’s was so accurate and anti-authoritarian that it could not be published during the author’s lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s.     In 1987, at the height of glasnost, Heart of a Dog was published for the first time in the Soviet Union, and perhaps that’s why Pogrebinsky felt the need to convey the greatness of Boulgakov.

The influence that Boulgakov had on a new and highly educated generation of youths in the late 1960s cannot be ignored, and Pogrebinsky, like many of the intellectuals of the day, regarded Boulgakov with a special reverence.   In 1991 this painting was exhibited in Paris, after which it was purchased for a private collection in the United States.    The painting stands tall and wide, with the 69” x 80” dimensions.   Boulgakov is one among the few great artistic odes to literary philosophical achievement.  

In the actual painting we see a sweeping and dramatic visual scene, with a kind of prophetic coolness given off by the dark shades. Right in the middle, sitting very upright, in his short hair-cut, is the author himself, Mikhail Boulgakov (Detail 4). He seems to be dressed up for the occasion --- the occasion of searching’s and wonderings through the fields of Pogrebinsky’s Philosophical Realist galaxy. Behind, with the same cool glance, stands Mephistopheles, the Devil, perhaps one of the most unexplainable characters in the whole work of Boulgakov.     The moon is large and blinding, and shining through a terribly imaginative sky. The steps rise up and lead into a distant nowhere, perhaps the shores of tranquility described in the novel.   But Mephistopheles (Woland) doesn’t have the face of tranquility, suffering, or laziness – it is the same cool glance that falls upon Boulgakov and Pontius Pilate (at the right). In the farther distance we see the two hooded figures walk into the unfathomable distance, colored by the darkened colors of the nightly sky.   They walk without looking back, perhaps the Margarita and the Master, and perhaps she is talking the Master into sleep again. In this scene, if the mind wishes it to be the Master, then it could be taken as a depiction of his release.  “Someone was releasing the Master into freedom,” Boulgakov wrote in his last chapter, “as he himself had released the hero he created. That hero, who was absolved on Sunday morning, had departed into the abyss, never to return, the son of an astrologer-king, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the knight of Pontius Pilate.” 

But this is not only the image dedicated to the Master and Margarita; it is to the thoughts of Boulgakov that this work is meant to represent.   It represents the question of human suffering and human happiness. Boulgakov and Pontius Pilate stare at us with piercing eyes – both are figures of the past’s turbulent times, and yet there is something futuristic in their glance, a cold and harsh understanding of society’s venomous abilities. Boulgakov was a highly artistic individual, and in so many ways the tortured Master in the novel is the actual author himself.   He sits upright and focuses on the distant world which we cannot see. We are like the thinkers and the wondering souls in the back of the image, lost amid unknown roads and skies.   He is the image of the tortured artist of the Soviet era with Margarita crying softly, saying, “How you’ve suffered, how you’ve suffered, my poor man! I’m the only one who knows how much.  Look, you have streaks of gray in your hair and a permanent line by your mouth. My only one, my darling, don’t think about anything.  You’ve had to think too much, and now I’ll do the thinking for you! And I promise you, I promise, everything will be spectacularly fine!”