Massolit

Massolit, the Moscow Literary Association, is the institutional embodiment of the Soviet literary establishment in The Master and Margarita. It is not merely a professional union but a closed, privileged corporation that controls the means of literary production, distribution, and reward. The organization is the primary target of the novel's satire, representing the corruption, hypocrisy, and bureaucratic absurdity of official Soviet culture. Its headquarters, the Griboedov House, is a temple of literary privilege where talent is measured by access to dachas, restaurant tables, and bureaucratic sinecures, and where the true artist is systematically excluded and destroyed.

Structure and Privileges

Massolit is headed by a chairman, Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, who is also the editor of a fat literary journal. The organization is housed in the Griboedov House, a two-storeyed cream-coloured building on the ring boulevard, which is called 'The House of Griboedov' on the grounds that it was alleged to have once belonged to an aunt of the writer Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov. The house contains a labyrinth of offices with signs advertising 'Fishing and Vacation Section', 'One-day Creative Trips', 'Perelygino', 'Sign up for Paper with Poklevkina', 'Cashier', 'Personal Accounts of Sketch-Writers', and 'Housing Question'. The ground floor is occupied by a restaurant considered the best in Moscow, serving fare like perch au naturel, sterlet in a silvery chafing dish, and fillets of thrush with truffles at reasonable prices. Membership in Massolit is denoted by a brown card smelling of costly leather with a wide gold border, a card known to all Moscow. The organization controls access to dachas in Perelygino on the Klyazma River, a country colony for writers, with only twenty-two dachas for three thousand members, leading to envy and resentment among the rank-and-file.

Key Members and Their Fates

The most prominent members include Berlioz, the chairman; the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who writes under the pseudonym Homeless; and the director of the Variety Theatre, Stepan Likhodeev. Other members include the belletrist Beskudnikov, the poet Dvubratsky, the writer Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova (who writes under the pen-name Bos'n George), the novelist leronym Poprikhin, the critic Ababkov, the scenarist Glukharev, and the writers Deniskin, Quant, and Zhukopov. The organization's leadership is decimated by the novel's supernatural events: Berlioz is decapitated by a tram-car at the Patriarch's Ponds, his death predicted by the mysterious consultant Woland. Likhodeev is magically transported to Yalta by Woland's retinue. The financial director Rimsky flees Moscow after a vampire attack. The administrator Varenukha is turned into a vampire. The master of ceremonies Georges Bengalsky has his head torn off and reattached during the black magic seance. The chairman of the tenants' association, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, is driven mad and committed to a psychiatric clinic after being framed for currency speculation by Koroviev.

Satirical Function and Thematic Significance

Massolit functions as a microcosm of the Soviet literary bureaucracy, where artistic merit is secondary to political conformity and access to material privileges. The organization's obsession with housing, vacation dachas, and restaurant fare satirizes the corruption of the intelligentsia by the state. The novel's narrator observes that the housing problem has corrupted the people, a sentiment echoed by Woland during the seance. The organization's hostility to genuine artistic creation is embodied in its treatment of the Master, whose novel about Pontius Pilate is rejected and viciously attacked by critics Latunsky, Ariman, and Mstislav Lavrovich, leading to his mental breakdown and confinement in a psychiatric clinic. The Master's fate contrasts sharply with the comfortable lives of Massolit's mediocrities, who are more concerned with securing dachas and restaurant tables than with literature. The novel's famous aphorism, 'Manuscripts don't burn', stands as a direct refutation of Massolit's power to suppress the truth, asserting the ultimate triumph of the free word over bureaucratic terror.