Sympathy for the spammer

ON DEC. 21, John Wilson, editor of the bimonthly review Books & Culture, received a piece of junk e-mail whose subject line read, in part, "the master gave," followed by another whose subject was "procurator of judea." Neither subject line, it goes without saying in this era of spam subterfuge, had anything at all to do with the contents of the e-mails.

But Wilson thought he detected a connection between the two sentence fragments: Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea, was used by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov as a character in the surreal anti-Stalinist novel "The Master and Margarita," written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s and published posthumously in 1967. After getting two more spam messages with the subject lines "the cat instantly" and "certain moscow institution," Wilson became convinced that his hunch was correct -- in the book, a talking tomcat tours Moscow with Satan -- and forwarded the messages to Ideas for confirmation.

Examining two different English translations, Ideas ascertained that the foregoing phrases do indeed appear in "The Master and Margarita." What's more, on Dec. 30 Ideas himself received a spam e-mail with the subject line "ivanovichs redbearded neighbour," a distinctive phrase from a chapter of Bulgakov's book titled "Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream."

But why use Bulgakov for spamming purposes? Recalling that "The Master and Margarita" inspired Mick Jagger's lyrics to "Sympathy for the Devil," Ideas turned to the passage in which the poet Ivan Homeless feels sympathy for the Master (a writer he meets in an insane asylum) -- and stumbled upon the answer to the riddle. Today's never-ending flood of junk e-mails, with their increasingly nonsensical subject lines, is like mail from a madhouse. Or so some literate spammer must have decided before deciding to reference Bulgakov's novel, in which the Master demands of Ivan, "How can one send letters from such an address -- a mental patient?"