‘Cowardice is the most terrible of vices’—which

The thought that there is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason?

manuscripts don’t burn.’

Some totalitarians prefer to conceal themselves behind the machinery of the state, but, like the cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart, Stalin liked conversing with his terrorized children. He was an intimate murderer.

‘Manuscripts don’t burn’,

Bulgakov’s gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.