Classics and modernity in the creative consciousness of Mikhail Bulgakov

The article presents the experience of analytical reading of M.A. Bulgakov’s novel «The Master and Margarita». The purpose of the work is to clarify the author’s attitude to modern literature and to the forms of its implementation in the modern ideological context. Based on the structural and typological relationships, the author reveals the architectonic scheme of the novel, which determines the plot features of the composition. Concepts and activators of the plot action are the images of Bezdomny, Berlioz and the Master. They associatively focus on other characters comparable to them (writers, ideologists, mystics, etc.), as well as numerous prototypes, including V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin, M. Gorky, V. Lenin, etc. The prototypes of the novel are organized in such a way that they denote not only the contextual contour of the work, but also its conceptual certainty. The cryptological reading of the novel, taking into account the ratio of contour and conceptual prototypes, clarifies the author’s attitude to modern phenomena and to modernity itself as a holistic phenomenon. The author’s criterion of historical, social and cultural manifestations of modernity is the classical measure.