INFERNAL AESTHETICS AS A STRUCTURE-FORMING PRINCIPLE IN MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S NOVEL THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

Abstract

This article examines infernal aesthetics in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita in order to determine its structural role in the organization of the novel’s artistic world. While previous studies have primarily interpreted the demonic through the images of Woland and his retinue, the opposition between good and evil, or the novel’s philosophical and religious meanings, the present study approaches the infernal as an aesthetic principle that shapes artistic reality and influences the novel’s composition, chronotope, system of characters, and mechanisms of meaning-making. The theoretical and methodological framework combines Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival, Yuri Lotman’s theory of semiotic explosion, and Edmund Burke’s aesthetic category of the sublime. The analysis focuses on several key episodes: the scene at Patriarch’s Ponds, the black magic performance at the Variety Theatre, and Satan’s Ball. The study demonstrates that infernal intervention disrupts the seemingly stable rational and semiotic order of Moscow reality, initiating its structural and semantic reorganization. Carnival inversion, semiotic destabilization, and the aestheticization of terror establish connections between the Moscow and Yershalaim narrative planes, activate the motifs of judgment, exposure, retribution, and moral choice, and transform chaos into an aesthetically organized form. The study concludes that the demonic element in the novel cannot be reduced to a plot device or a group of supernatural characters. Instead, it functions as a structural and aesthetic mechanism that ensures the novel’s compositional integrity and contributes to the formation of a unified metaphysical model of its artistic world.