‘Count Robert,’ Koroviev whispered to Margarita. ‘An equally interesting character. Rather amusing, your majesty…he was the queen’s lover and poisoned his own wife.’
‘We are delighted, Count,’ cried Behemoth.
One after another three coffins bounced out of the fireplace, splitting and breaking open as they fell.

When the Devil comes to town, he doesn’t hold back. Don’t let the patronymics put you off–the wicked games of The Master and Margarita can be enjoyed on as many levels as Moscow contains arms and legs. In what may rightly be called his masterpiece (don’t ask me, it’s the only one I’ve read), Bulgakov puts plenty under the microscope, from the entitlement-as-desperation of the Russian middle class to the insularity of the literary establishment.

To begin, a strange outsider, Woland, engages two Russian gentlemen in a seemingly harmless Socratic dialogue. Not much later, one is dead and the other is headed for the asylum. It seems obvious that this diabolical dude is not who he says he is. Meanwhile, the Master is in the same asylum, a deflated but likeable man who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate. Excoriated by the press at the height of Russia’s enthused embrace of atheism, he has retreated from life and his lover, Margarita. Many tricks that are much more than tricks ensue.

Bulgakov plays with traditional ideas of the good/evil dichotomy. Devil Woland, with his anarchic tricks and playful entourage, resembles no-one more than the trickster god Loki. If Bulgakov reconstitutes the Devil as a trickster, he posits Jesus as a philosophical human, albeit one with the power to enchant for millenia. The Master’s novel forges an anastomosis between the eras of New Testament Jerusalem and Stalinist Moscow, as well as an accord between the forces of good and evil that is balanced yet ineffable. It is in the nature of good and evil that true understanding of them should be elusive, and so the most enduring impression left by this novel is its reverence for integrity in literature: as much as the hijinks and high historical drama are the dream of a repressive political regime, they are also the triumphant and enduring product of a writer exorcising his demons.

Achilles, Antigone, Mary Magdalene–these are all figures we are used to associating with strength, sacrifice and forgiveness. Marguerite Yourcenar rewrites their extraordinary stories and interpolates therein the experience of tragic romantic love. But for all Yourcenar’s skill and thoughtfulness, evident in her other works, the torment and deliciousness of love are but poorly served in Fires; I was disappointed, even a little disgusted. The great dramatic potential in the most well-known stories of pre-Biblical times is utterly adrift in the prose, which ultimately seems to be the end point of a cathartic process rather than a narrative which can convey the true pathos of catharsis itself.

Fires comprises 11 stories, or rather portions of lyrical prose, in the voices of the respective title characters. Thus, ‘Clytemnestra, or Crime’ begins with an address by Clytemnestra to the jury assigned to her case, the murder of her husband Agamemnon. ‘Clytemnestra’ is among the easiest of the chapters to follow. Others, like the Antigone story, begin with stream of consciousness musings and gain little structure thereafter. There is a certain horror to witnessing such emblematic women made the mouthpieces of trivial, bitter laments. One can only assume from the repetitive yet strangely vague vocalisations that Yourcenar had a very specific emotional axe to grind but was satisfied merely with wearing it away. The historical details used to set the scene, though plentiful, are overwhelmed by violently devotional symbolism and such time-travelling therefore seems useless. The utterer of the line ‘I am rich and hairless’ might well have been Donald Trump as the fabled Xerxes.

It’s possible, though, that if the book contained only these portions, Fires would not have been so unpalatable. But inserted between the stories are poetic segues in a voice ex nihilo, and it is these that completely unbalance Fires. Fawning, aggrandising epistles dedicated to an unnamed love-object are rarely attractive to anyone other than the recipient, and we get 11 of them here. They only aggravate a reader already left in tatters from the counter-intuitive and unknowable shifts of emotional direction that arise from the schizophrenia of catharsis.

What I had hoped to find from this book was an exquisite representation of reworked characters of classic literature, a typology detailing what love can drive a person, fabled or not, to do. Fires instead reads like the unedited diary of an anguished girl, and the bridging parts apparently were reworked versions of extracts from Yourcenar’s diary. However, the preface is fascinating; it’s analytical and controlled yet seems more convincingly passionate than the book proper. Read the preface, if you like.