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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GENRE OF THE INITIATION NOVEL... served to show the trials of man by way of initiation. Thus, Leonid Katsis was partially right when he contended, “It is not difficult to see that Bely keeps searching for ‘his road to Damascus’ on the paths of initiation.”"® But Katsis was right only in part, because Bely’s path was not only his, as it has given a stimulus to many authors. Thanks to his efforts, a new literary genre came into being, the texts of which, in the new and extremely unambiguously determined historical conditions of the Soviet regime, still dared to assume the functions of the ritual of initiation. In the Soviet era of Russian literature, several versions of this genre were conceived, among the most notable authors of which we find Velimir Khlebnikov, Boris Pilnyak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak and others. One of the novels by these authors is most noteworthy in following Bely in the exact reconstruction of and no less precise differentiation between Masonic and Rosicrucian initiation: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It is important to note that Bulgakov’s oeuvre shows that he inherited many patterns from the Symbolist setting. This can be clearly seen in his capacity to link the “rare” and the “obvious.” This means was developed by Bulgakov into a unique art of blending the techniques of cryptography and uncoded writing, and thus he was able to contribute to preserving the memory of culture in an era of aggressively spreading amnesia. Of late, experts on Bulgakov have frequently cited his characterization of himself: “I am a mystical writer.” However, they have failed to point out that Bulgakov drew the limits of his mysticism, saying, “I am not a clergyman or a theosophist.” A great many studies exist in which the novel The Master and Margarita is considered as a myth-novel, a gnostic novel, a transcendental novel, or a mystery novel, and the Cathar associations and Masonic motifs in the novel are discussed. But peculiar as it might seem considering the abundant secondary literature, there is no study on Bulgakov which has considered the path of the initiation of one of the novel’s main protagonists, Ivanushka. The primitive Soviet poet, who as noted earlier uses the pseudonym Bezdomny (“Homeless”), turns into a pacified historian called Ivan Ponyrev (the surname meaning “One who has been immersed in water”). The main line in the narrative, which is stressed by the first scene and the scene in the epilogue, will tell a lot about the essence of this path. Its details coherently recreate the grades of Masonic initiation (the first part of the novel) and Rosicrucian initiation (the second part of the novel), following the model designed by Belly. © Leonid Katsis, Smena paradigm i smena paradigmy. Ocherki russkoj literatury, isskustva i nauki XX-go veka (Changing Paradigms and Paradigm Shift. The Main Lines of 20"-Century Russian Literature, Art and Science), Moscow, Rossiiskij Gosudarstvennyj Gumanitarnyj Universitet, 2012, 421. + 277 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 277 6 2020. 06.15. 11:04:24
