The Devil’s Anthem

Description

“The Devil’s Anthem” is a short novel by the Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulga. It is distinguished by its satirical critique of the state of affairs in Russia. Written in 1924, the novel poignantly and deeply portrays the chaos that had gripped the country, the citizen’s sense of loss and alienation, and the fear for the future, which was teetering on the brink of collapse. This was all unfolding before a group of people who had exhausted themselves with everything and were destroying everything for a purpose known only to “the Devil”! The protagonist, Korotkov, the secretary of a match warehouse, who had banished from his mind the notion of “the vicissitudes of time” and instead cultivated the unwavering belief that he would continue in his job at the warehouse until the end of life on Earth, found himself living through a predicament rarely seen except in totalitarian regimes or in Moscow in the early 1920s, a time of transition from one system to another. At this point, Korotkov finds himself dismissed from his job for mistakenly using his new manager’s name and for injuring his eye while testing the matchboxes he received instead of his monthly salary. The character who dismisses him—”Kelsoner”—is a very strange figure, part human and part demonic. He takes over the institution and begins to tamper with it and its employees. When Korotkov tries to understand what is happening, his troubles begin with the theft of his personal documents and culminate in the discovery that “Kelsoner” and his group, the “Kelsoniers,” are running the entire country. The theme of the devil is one of Bulgakov’s favorites, and perhaps the religious environment in which he was raised, along with his reading of the Old and New Testaments and other texts, provided him with a wealth of material in this area.