This review is dedicated to Mary, the very model of a perfect co-moderator and GR friend.Unlocking the Meaning of The Master and MargaritaMikhail BulgakovIn the decades following the publication of The Master and Margarita, myriad critics have attempted to find a key to unlock the meaning of Bulgakov’s unfinished masterwork. Some viewed the novel as a political roman à clef, laboriously substituting historical figures from Stalinist Moscow for Bulgakov’s characters. Others posited a religious formula to understand the relationships between good and evil in the novel.After giving myself time to think, I believe that any attempts to reduce the novel to a formula reflect some readers’ desire for neat, safe boxes to contain the world. This approach is at odds with the fear-ridden, desperate, and yet transcendent reality of Bulgakov’s experience in writing, revising, destroying, reconstructing, and then revising the novel, up to his death in Moscow on March 10, 1940. The Master and Margarita shows evidence of Bulgakov’s struggles to complete it, especially in part two, which illness prevented him from revising. I believe that the novel’s profound humanity stems from these imperfections, these facets not quite fitting neatly together, these jarring movements from scene to scene. In the end, The Master and Margarita is, by virtue of its own existence, a testament to the necessity of art in times of repression, and to the urgent need for artists to veer from cowardice and hold firmly to their commitment to living a true human life, with fantasy and reality combined, with history and invention feeding into each other, with good and evil providing the shadows and depth that make life meaningful and real.The Master and Margarita as Fairy TaleOne approach to The Master and Margarita that appeals to me is understanding it, in part, as a fairy tale. In the novel, Bulgakov threads together three different storylines, which intertwine, especially at the novel’s conclusion: the often slapstick depiction of life in Stalinist Moscow, seen in part through the antics of the devil Woland and his demonic helpers; the story of Pilate, with names and details transformed from the familiar Biblical versions; and the story of the Master and Margarita. The action takes place in a compressed time frame, so readers looking for character development will be disappointed. Instead, Bulgakov develops an extended allegory where flight equals freedom, where greed and small-mindedness are punished, and where weary artists are afforded some mercy and peace.The Master and Margarita provided Bulgakov with a lifeline to the imagination in the midst of the stultifying culture of Stalinist Russia. There are healthy doses of wish fulfillment in the novel, especially in those sections in which Woland’s minions, Azazello, Behemoth, and Koroviev, wreak retribution for the petty-mindedness and greed inherent in this political and social system. There also is a desperate attempt to resist the Stalinist bent towards monotony and flatness, and instead to weave dizzying strands of magic, fantasy, and power into life in Moscow.BehemothThese attempts to use a story as wish fulfillment, criticizing a social order by turning it upside down in fiction, and recognizing how to use an audience’s sense of wonder as a fulcrum for change, resonate with the historical and cultural functions of fairy tales as described by scholars including Jack Zipes in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition and Marina Warner in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. Magic and wonder force the reader to acknowledge other possibilities outside of a reality of political repression, poverty, and war. When fairy tales reveal challenges to misplaced authority, whether in the guise of an evil queen or a greedy government official, they may take on one of two roles: a subversive threat to authority, or a valve to release the pressure of living under severe constraints. Perhaps most important, fairy tales remind their readers that life is miraculous, and that certain freedoms, such as the freedom to imagine and dream, can be nurtured and honored even under the most restrictive regimes. For Bulgakov, the blend of the fantastical and the everyday in The Master and Margarita serves as his manifesto. Throughout his life, he fought to preserve the full human experience, not the two-dimensional totalitarianism in the Stalinist USSR, where human life was flattened of any sense of wonder, creativity, exuberance. Instead, he advocated for human life with all its shadows and colors, with a foundation in imagination and wonder. The freedom he sought was not simply freedom from communal housing or repressive government policies. Instead, he sought the freedom to imagine, to dream, to infuse his life with wonder, and to share his vision. For this reason, any attempt to read The Master and Margarita as a simple satire of Stalinist totalitarianism is misguided. Instead, Bulgakov sought to fly free along with his characters, and in doing so to tap into the universal human need for imagination, wonder, and freedom of the intellect and spirit.“For me the inability to write is as good as being buried alive”Bulgakov and his wife Yelena, c. 1939Although Bulgakov universalized his quest for artistic freedom in The Master and Margarita, he drew inspiration and a sense of urgency from his experiences. A playwright, he faced censorship as his plays were banned and productions cancelled. He saw his fellow writers imprisoned for following their calling. (In response to one of these cases, Bulgakov destroyed one version of The Master and Margarita, which he later reconstructed.)In desperation, between 1929 and 1930 Bulgakov wrote three letters to Soviet government officials, including Stalin, to protest his censorship and beg for a chance to practice his art, if not within Russia, outside it. In the final letter, dated March 28, 1930, Bulgakov movingly describes his ordeal, arguing that his duty as a writer is to defend artistic freedom, and pleading that being silenced is tantamount to death.Although the letters provided Bulgakov with employment after receiving a favorable response, and saved him from arrest or execution, he still faced his works’ being banned and suppressed. He devoted the last years of his life to revising The Master and Margarita, knowing he would not live to see it published, and sometimes despairing it would ever be read outside of his family circle. His widow, Yelena Shilovskaya, worked tirelessly after his death for decades, preserving his manuscript and finally seeing it published, in a censored version, in 1966 and 1967. Planes of Reality: The Fantastic, The Historical, and the TotalitarianAzazello, Behemoth, and KorovievSome criticism of The Master and Margarita comes from the abrupt transitions and changes in mood among the three storylines: the actions of Woland and his minions in Moscow; the transformed story of Pontius Pilate, with some striking changes to the names of characters and the sequence of events which simultaneously make the narrative seem more historical and keep readers off-balance; and the story of the Master and Margarita, which includes Bulgakov’s central concerns about cowardice, artistry, duty, loyalty and love. I believe that Bulgakov purposefully constructed his novel so that the reader would be pulled from dimension to dimension. The effect, although jarring, is one of constant instability and surprise. The reader is immersed in a world where a Biblical past seems more historically based and less fantastic than 20th-century Moscow, where characters who are petty and greedy are meted out fantastic public punishments, at times literally on a stage, and where in the end characters with the most substance and loyalty have their lives transformed through magic.By carefully building this multifaceted world, with all the seams showing, Bulgakov forces us as readers to consider the intersections among these worlds. Bulgakov reveals how we cut ourselves off from the wellsprings of magic and wonder, and invites us to join him in mounting a broomstick and riding off into the night sky, free from the constraints of our everyday lives.The Necessity of Shadows: WolandWolandJust as Bulgakov confounds his readers’ expectations of a unified and seamless world, so he also makes us question our assumptions about good and evil. A key character is Woland, the devil at the center of the magical action. From his appearance in the first chapter, Woland presents an arresting and disconcerting figure. Woland immediately inserts himself into a conversation with Berlioz, the editor of a literary magazine and chair of MASSOLIT, a prestigious literary association, and Ivan, a poet also known by his pen name Bezdomny, engaging in a debate with them about the existence of God. Berlioz parrots many of the current arguments against the existence of God, but Woland deftly counters his arguments in a manner that veers between the charming and the sinister.This debate introduces a theme that runs throughout The Master and Margarita: a cosmos in which good and evil each have their jurisdiction, but work together to ensure that people get the rewards or punishments that they deserve. In a famous passage later in the novel, Woland provides the following cogent description: “You pronounced your words as if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of either shadows or evil. But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and from living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."Throughout The Master and Margarita, Woland metes out justice to wrongdoers. However, he does not simply punish -- instead, he also rewards Margarita for her devotion, intelligence, loyalty, and bravery. He rescues the Master from his exile in the asylum and ultimately grants him and Margarita a destiny of peace and rest together. In doing so, Woland overturns our expectations. Bulgakov describes a world where good and evil powers work together to provide some justice and balance in our lives, in spite of the thoughtless and cruel ways that humans behave. As Woland tells Margarita at one point, “Everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on.” The true evil in The Master and Margarita does not rise from Hell, but instead comes from the pettiness and greed of flawed, small-minded humans.The Master and Margarita: Responsibility to ArtThe Master makes his appearance relatively late in the novel, in chapter 13, “Enter the Hero.” However, he is not the traditional hero. He is a broken man, living in an asylum, remembering his love for Margarita, while at the same time turning his back on the art that Margarita loved, protected, and honored: his novel about Pontius Pilate.In a lengthy conversation with Ivan, the Master paints an idyllic portrait of his life with Margarita, who creates a cozy sanctuary full of roses and love, in which the written word is treasured and respected: “Running her slender fingers and pointed nails through her hair, she endlessly reread what he had written, and then she sewed the very cap he had shown Ivan. Sometimes she would squat down next to the lower shelves or stand up on a chair next to the upper ones and dust the hundreds of books. She predicted fame, urged him on, and started calling him Master. She waited eagerly for the promised final words about the fifth procurator of Judea, recited the parts she especially liked in a loud sing-song voice, and said that the novel was her life.”However this idyll comes to a crashing end when the Master completes the manuscript and looks for a publisher. He provides harrowing descriptions of his brutal treatment by the literary world in Moscow, as editors, publishers, and fellow writers publicly criticized him for his novel. These descriptions bear the pain of Bulgakov’s personal experience with censorship and rejection, culminating in the Master’s paralyzing fear of everything around him.Finally, in a scene inspired by events in Bulgakov’s life, the Master attempts to destroy his manuscript. Although Margarita salvages some pages, this scene marks the end of her life with the Master, who turns his back on Margarita and his art. He describes himself as a man without a name or a future, marking time in the asylum. Bulgakov depicts the Master as a broken man, whose loss of spirit and cowardice in the face of adversity led him to lose everything of value in his life.MargaritaMargarita poses a stark contrast to the Master. When we finally meet her in part two, she is grieving over losing the Master, but she also shows herself to be intelligent, energetic, and fearless in her determination to find him and rebuild their life together. In doing so, Margarita is not taking an easy path. She is married to a successful husband who adores her. The two live in a large apartment with a great deal of privacy, a true luxury in Stalinist Moscow. She is beautiful, but she cannot put behind her deep dissatisfaction with her life, apparently perfect on the surface, but with no depth. She is living a lie. Her despair starts to break when she has a dream about the Master, which she views as a portent that her torment will soon come to an end. After rushing from her home, she has a fateful conversation with Azazello, whom Woland has tasked with inviting her to officiate as his queen at his ball. Margarita handles the interaction with spirit and courage, agreeing to follow Azazello’s mysterious instructions in hopes of learning the Master’s fate.Margarita’s Night RideMargarita is transformed and embarks on a night ride, flying naked on a broomstick over Moscow. After wreaking havoc at the apartment of a publisher who had tormented the Master, and comforting a small boy who awakened, terrified by the destruction, she participates in a moonlight gathering of other magical creatures. Afterwards, she returns to Moscow in a magical car, “After all that evening's marvels and enchantments, she had already guessed who they were taking her to visit, but that didn't frighten her. The hope that there she would succeed in regaining her happiness made her fearless.” The night ride is a symbol of Margarita’s freedom and power.Her fearlessness propels Margarita through her meeting with Woland and his minions, and a surreal evening as the queen of Woland’s midnight ball. Her devotion is rewarded by Woland, in scenes full of magic and moonlight. Although the Master crumbles in the face of adversity, Margarita becomes the ultimate hero and savior through her courage and commitment to the Master and his art.The MoonThroughout The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses key symbols to tie together the different chapters and storylines. Perhaps the most important symbol is the moon, which appears frequently in practically every chapter. The moon conveys a kind of otherworldly truth. Characters are bathed in moonlight at critical points in the novel, especially when making entrances, as when the Master first appears in Ivan’s hospital room. Moonlight imparts insight and truth even to the most delusional of characters. The moon lights the night rides of Woland, his companions, Margarita and the Master.Woland and company: Night RideThe moonlight also features prominently in the Pilate chapters, serving as a lynchpin between them and the rest of the novel. Pilate looks up at the moon for solace in the face of his agony from his migraines and his cowardice, with his faithful dog Banga as his sole companion. Bulgakov uses the moon to illuminate Pilate’s torment and his final peace, granted to him by the Master, his creator:"[Pilate] has been sitting here for about two thousand years, sleeping, but, when the moon is full, he is tormented, as you see, by insomnia. And it torments not only him, but his faithful guardian, the dog. If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it. The only thing that brave creature ever feared was thunderstorms. But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves."In response to Woland’s prompting, the Master stands and shouts the words that complete his novel, and end Pilate’s torture:“The path of moonlight long awaited by the procurator led right up to the garden, and the dog with the pointed ears was the first to rush out on it. The man in the white cloak with the blood-red lining got up from his chair and shouted something in a hoarse, broken voice. It was impossible to make out whether he was laughing or crying, or what he was shouting, but he could be seen running down the path of moonlight, after his faithful guardian.”Pilate, Banga and the moonBulgakov follows this transformative scene with Woland’s gift of peace to the Master. As she did throughout the novel, Margarita remains by the Master’s side, his loyal companion through eternity. Bulgakov cannot give salvation to the Master, perhaps because of the enormity of his cowardice against art, perhaps because he has been so damaged by a hostile society. In these final passages, Margarita gives the Master, and the reader, a soothing picture of a peaceful life, perhaps one Bulgakov himself longed for:"Listen to the silence," Margarita was saying to the Master, the sand crunching under her bare feet. "Listen and take pleasure in what you were not given in life—quiet. Look, there up ahead is your eternal home, which you've been given as a reward. I can see the Venetian window and the grape-vine curling up to the roof. There is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evenings people you like will come to see you, people who interest you and who will not upset you. They will play for you, sing for you, and you will see how the room looks in candlelight. You will fall asleep with your grimy eternal cap on your head, you will fall asleep with a smile on your lips. Sleep will strengthen you, you will begin to reason wisely. And you will never be able to chase me away. I will guard your sleep."
At the hour of the brisk fall sunrise, two citizens appeared at the Boston Commons. One of them, a man of about forty, with hunched shoulders under an astrakhan coat, was short, black-haired, and moony-eyed beneath tortoise-shell spectacles. The other, much younger, maybe early-twenties, tall and thin, in a red tartan and blue-jeans, tousled chestnut-hair, and sleepy lashes, was looking out over the greying gardens. For some reason this younger citizen was fingering something in his pocket, devil knows what.The first was none other than Mikhail Mikhailovich Kuklov, a slick editor for the local Arts and Culture Journal for the city, and anyway a chairman of the board at the Theatre and at the Public Library, his young companion was a book-reviewer named David Davidovich Davidov, who wrote under the pseudonym of Listless. They were crossing through the gardens, toward the cold-glassy pond, wherein floated the lifeless chassis of the city's famous cygnet-skiffs. Passing the lifeless swans and crossing a small stone footbridge, they dashed first-thing to the lone, bright sign of a hot-bun vendor reading "Hot Boston Buns: $5.00." A steep price for buns, anyway.It should be noted at this point a most peculiar feature of this dreary October morning. There was not one person, neither ten people, but precisely no one in the park, save for our two high-minded citizens at the bun stand. There was no one in the Commons, not up on the monument hill, nor down in the field, nor on the cement-grey paths: not one person. It was the same story in the Gardens: not one person by the pond, nor by the fountains, nor walking the criss-cross gardened ways. No one!--"Two coffees" Kuklov asked.--"No coffee, mister" replied the bun vendor.--"Tea, then?"--"No tea, neither."--"So what do you have? Something warm for the stomach" Kuklov asked, anyway, annoyed.--"...Buns, mister. Or hot cocoa," the merchant rejoined, also, for some reason, annoyed, though he had no other customers to speak of.--"The cocoa then," David Davidovich cut in.The vendor poured two white Styrofoam cups precisely three-quarters of the way with the molten cocoa, which sent streamers of steam curling in the morning air. Having hazarded a sip, Kuklov confirmed his suspicion that the hot beverage was, in fact, too hot, and having confirmed this walked with his companion adroitly to the park bench beside the rental nest for the swan-shaped sloops, floating lifeless on the still water.David looked around anxiously. Large abandoned parks made him anxious for some reason. Perhaps it had something to do with what psychologists called precisely agoraphobia, or perhaps it was just a vague apprehension for the unmet potential for so vast a space. He etiolated and turned toward the bridge, thinking: "what is wrong with me... I must be cracked to be so nervous, for no reason! Maybe it's time, anyway, to send it to the devil and pack it up for..." This thought was disrupted presently by his older companion who let out an idle sigh, which was for some reason very disruptive.David was thinking about his column. He had recently read Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita for the Massachusett's Literary Journal, Masslit for short, which was precisely the same Journal for which his friend was the esteemed editor. It was about the forty-sixth anniversary of its publication, which seemed a strange anniversary to celebrate, thought David, but he had received his orders and written his review, anyway. The talking cat had seemed a bit of a trite invention to him, but he wrote a nice review anyway, for some reason, and when it was done he had liked it.All of a sudden, to the editor's displeasure, there appeared in the road a very tall woman, taller than he had ever seen, but for some reason, seeming to disappear in air, pellucid like water in the air before him. And where did she come from? I couldn't say, and neither, for that matter could Mikhail Mikhailovich. She wore a long yellow sundress with white-wisps of floral-arabesques, very unseasonable, but for some reason she didn't look cold at all! She shimmered in the air briefly before him, and when he blinked, she was gone precisely from the spot she had just occupied on the pavement. He blinked twice quickly, like a facial tick-tick, to check himself doubly, and looked at his fellow citizen to glean his companion's corresponding reaction, but David seemed not to have noticed for some reason, so he dismissed the strange Amazon, which anyway seemed to him an amazing apparition of great power and strange beauty."Pah! the devil!" exclaimed the editor. "I must've had a stroke or something! I thought I saw some seven-foot Amazon in a damned yellow dress, for a second, do you believe it? Some kind of Hippolyta-broad! Seven feet, by god, and shimmering like a hologram! My god, this cocoa has gone straight to my head" (or anyway to his waist). David looked at him, a bit disturbed, but mostly in disbelief. He let some time pass and for the strange occurrence to ebb away. "Your review, you know, David. It was no good."--"What, Mik? What was bad about it?"--"Well if I am being honest, it was a bit off-topic, y'know? All those damned bits about revolutions and history and your personal bullshit, yea, those trite personal bits, those really were a bit off, y'know Dave?"--"It's a personal review style, I've always written like that, Mik... have the readership complained or something?"--"No that's not it, Dave, and you know I love your reviews, man, really I do." Mikhail Mikhailovich responded warmly. He explained that it was new management of some kind. Anyway the Masslit Journal had been bought out, devil knows why, by precisely some big corporate bulldog-type. And despairing though he was, and dreading the changes that would come, David Davidovich's despair was cut short by the appearance of a strange, foreign looking man.--"Hey Mik, looks like the park isn't empty anyway, look at that odd fellow!" David said.--"He must be from the South, Georgia or something, look at those damned-unusual clothes!" he conjectured, for the odd man was wearing a light spring coat and khakis (too short), my god, he was wearing short khaki pants, and you could see his lozenged silk socks, clashing quite horribly with his Oxford wingtips and damned strange thick horn-rimmed glasses.--"Yea, and those specs! Georgia, maybe, or Europe maybe, somewhere in France? Those French fellows are damned odd." Mikhail Mikhailovich agreed, and posited that maybe somewhere Nordic, or in the Eastern block: Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia even, maybe! But before they could quite come to a consensus on the strange foreigner's origins, he had approached them, and began:--"Were you talking, just now, about Bulgakov?"The two citizens literally jumped with surprise and their nape-hairs bristled in their jackets at the bell-clear English of their odd interlocutor. For some reason, and by some how, they were both certain that he was precisely a foreigner, but also that he was precisely a native.--"...yes, citizen, we were." David replied after the intercession of what seemed maybe too long to be polite.--"Excellent, excellent novelist, you think? That devil and his great goetic tricks! Such fun, eh?"At this, they suspected he might be Canadian, but anyway, they couldn't be precisely sure. David pushed his ears back and down into his shoulder and gestured a small shrug of tepid agreement, and was accompanied by his companion with a dubious nod.--"And that Pontius Pilate, what a damned character, eh? All that red-lined white robed procurator and his damned sentimentality and half-baked conviction for that pretty pious Ha-Nozri, pah! To the devil with him!" And with this last comment he looked down the lane at a barren oak and then shot a sly stare at this benched acquaintances, askance, as if to check boiling water.--"Yes, yes, very interesting. Excellent piece of fiction, timeless." the editor said, to appease the strange man.--"Fiction? But my friend, every word of it is precisely true! Yes, yes, the whole thing, the master, and the sanatorium, and lovely queen Margarita, and Woland, yes, Woland and his retinue! The whole thing, really. Do you believe it? Yes, every word."At this, the two citizens looked at each other, and for some reason could literally read each others' minds. And it was that they were talking precisely to a madman, and that for some reason it felt eerily familiar, though they could not pin down just why that was.From the corners of their eyes they observed a tall woman in a knee-length brown coat, with sheer lining, and boots to match, with a small girl in similar dress, but with a woolen purple hat and red mittens, at the bun stand. The mother bought her and her daughter buns, and bit into them with a womanly savoir-faire. David thought for some reason that this woman, instead of relieving his apprehension of the empty park, heightened it by accentuating the emptiness, and the innocent young daughter seemed a daisy-bud exposed to the bitter frost of a wide-open windowsill. He was watching them walk away, when the strange foreigner, who must have followed his gaze, asked him adroitly: "Youth! Ah, but alas sometimes it ends too soon, don't you think, David Davidovich?"Precisely shocked, David Davidovich asked "how do you know my name?"--"From your reviews of course! Listless... David Davidovich, yes, it would seem your pseudonym is not as effective when you are proudly credited in the back fold, eh? But like I said, it is sad for youth to end so soon, eh -- like that precious girl over there, pretty as a porcelain doll, but alas! as fragile."--"What do you mean?" David asked apprehensively, for this thought had occurred to him a lot recently. People had been disappearing lately in quite strange circumstances. Yes, strange circumstances, strange precisely because they were completely unexplained! And not only youths, but his coevals also, his contemporaries. Authors, co-workers, landlords, police-offices and traffic cops, the barista at the coffee shop beneath his apartment, and strangely even the woman he had been seeing (for two dinners and a breakfast, anyway), had disappeared like smoke in the wind, like water in water. One day they were there in front of him: comforting familiar faces, the next day they were disconnected phone lines, or vacant subway seats, or vague, veiled "they're not in today"s, all over the city! Suddenly his heart pulled up in his chest, and he felt like he would eat it. That poor girl! He felt for some reason that she too would disappear.--"Why, because she is going to die today, I'm afraid" the strange foreigner said with what could have been genuine or mock sentiments.From the top of his throat, David's heart dropped suddenly to the pit of his stomach, pulling down into his bowels with a stunned sort of fear. He felt unable to speak.--"Nonsense, nonsense!" Kuklov said, after his long silence and nervous stillness. He was certain now that he was talking to a madman, a complete madman! --"Ah, Mikhail Mikhailovich! I had nearly forgotten you were here, and to think! With so much of you to forget!" he said, looking at his corpulent companion folded fat-wise on the bench. Kuklov demurred. "But enough of that sad business, I should introduce myself, how impolite of me!"The two citizens, literally reeling from the pronounced death-knell of the young girl who was sprightly walking away now with her mother, had to admit they had been curious of the identity of their interlocutor. Though, they were still in shock.--"Jeff Wilke," he said with veiled pride.The two stunned citizens looked at each other. Neither recognized the name.--"You're thinking 'who is this Wilke fellow? Like we should know him by name, damned bastard!' - am I correct? Well anyway, I work for A---" he replied with oracular clarity and precision.Mikhail Mikhailovich felt a brief black haze of syncope, jumped up, and was suddenly out of breath. It should be noted now that the Masslit Journal, a regional journal of the GoodReads Community, Inc. (a national Art & Culture magazine, printed under a wide variety of regional standards) had been purchased by this very same A--- company! This very same! And it was precisely this change in management which had necessitated this conversation with the young Listless. He felt his heart humming louder and faster, clanging in his chest like a hammer on steel. He looked first at David, and then at this strange Mr. Wilke. His heart throbbed with indecision and uncertainty, and he felt he would die...With still tepid indecision, he extended his hand, not knowing precisely was he was doing, and said "Nice... to me-...et you..."--"To the devil with it!" the editor thought, when this strange Mr. Wilkes took his hand with enthusiasm and with a strange stare which seemed to see past Mikhail Mikhailovich, seemed to see through him.David still sat, not knowing precisely what happened, having not heard the details of A---, though of course he knew of it vaguely, like a lighthouse in the fog. But before he could get up and do the same as his deferential editor, he heard a Hellish clamor!Behind them, there was screaming and smoke, and people pouring about like water from a broken bucket. The air was still with white noise and a hollow vibration of horror, as the grey nightmare was uncovered and pieced together with jigsaw terror. A sleepy driver had hit the young girl, and she had been precisely decapitated by the veritable vehicle of death! A thick-red ooze pooled in the street, and the mother was prostrate in sorrow on the sidewalk, being fanned by a pedestrian. Where this pedestrian and all these witnesses came from, devil knows! When David returned to himself, which may have taken minutes, or precisely even tens of minutes, he didn't know. He was surprised to see that the mysterious Mr. Wilke had gone! Disappeared! And even stranger still, so had Mikhail Mikhailovich! Where had they gone? He would never know! He looked again towards the accident, to see if in the confusion they had hurried to the girl's or the mother's aid, but they were not there! "To the devil with them!" he thought.After a minute or so, he stood up on still uncertain legs, and started to walk home to his small studio apartment, where he supposed he would call Mikhail Mikhailovich, and also maybe begin to re-tool his review of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita -- which he for some reason remembered now, even though his brain was literally swimming with the foggy phantoms of that morning. And foggy too! The late morning had brought on a strange fog! "By god, what a strange morning" he thought, walking through the billowing sheets of the foggy October day. For it was no longer morning, it was precisely eleven, and he had to go home. And the fog seemed to get thicker, and he wondered where the devil could Kuklov have gone, and why the devil he had left. And then looking around he wonder where the devil he was. And for some reason he was never seen again. This work by David Lavieri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
What do You think about The Master And Margarita (1996)?
I read this essay once. On what makes a book great. Not good, but great. Ink splattered across yellowed pages, nesting on dusty shelves, more names than I would ever know. And for all I know, they are all good. Nestled in those pages, between silverfish and imagination, is some saving grace: something that makes even the most mundane and nonsense redeemable. Atleast, so I would like to think. But what makes a book great? What makes it rise above the dust and the grime and exist, blood and veins, bones and sinew. The essay I was referring to had these very succinctly explained points, or mile markers: a checklist if you will. But I believe that beneath all the bullet points, what the writer wanted to tell was that these are the books that shift something in you. A smorgasbord, or even one clear distinction, that after you have read it, you know you are changed. The you that you were before that particular book existed for you is gone. Forever. Some would say that about most good books, what makes a great book separate from the assembly line is that it is a jarring slap to your consciousness. The Master and the Margarita, written over a period of twelve years, was one of them, for me. “Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!” Simply speaking, it is a fable. A masterfully crafted lyrical fairy tale. An outlandish story in a very real Soviet Union. It is a carnival of characters, a nonsensical array of theatrics, pages after pages of historical archetypes, paradigm shifts and revelations. It is a feast to satisfy the most exacting of literature enthusiasts. “But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.” (view spoiler)[Three distinct and interlacing storylines is apparent in the novel: a love story between the master and margarita, the arrival and mischief of Professor Woland and the story of Pontius Pilate and Ha-Nozri. And in each case, I was struck by how much these characters seemed to be isolated like characters on the silver screen or characters in a play on a theatre, distinct and separate from the rest of the world in the audience. For instance, the book begins by the author asking the reader to take notice of the fact that ‘Not a soul was to be seen around--not only at the stall, but anywhere along the entire avenue, running parallel to Malaya Bronnaya. At that hour, when it no longer seemed possible to breathe, when the sun was tumbling in a dry haze somewhere behind Sadovoye Circle, leaving Moscow scorched and gasping, nobody came to cool off under the lindens, to sit down on a bench. The avenue was deserted.' Such notes of abseetism is notable throughout the entire novel: The first appearance of professor Woland was almost not, the remarks by Woland on the absence of Berlioz to his future appointments, the flight of Margarita on her first day as a witch was shrouded from the people, even her stint at the destruction of the apartment building was an act in confidence of the reader and removed by an absent perpetrator hovering invisible above the masses, the spectacle of the century by Woland, the isolation of the master in the institution, the isolation of Margarita, the isolation at being the only one with the faculties of comprehension at the presence of Woland(Bezdomny) and so on and so on. The thematic presence of Death is also all pervasive. The book itself begins with (Goethe, Faust): “...so who are you in the end?”“I am a part of that power which eternally desires evil and eternally does good.” Death resonates and embodies the driving mechanism of the story. Such that the death of the editor Bezdomny is the catalyst to the series of incredible events that shapes the tumult in Moscow, the death of Ha-Nozri that drives the story of Pontius Pilate and allows the reader to revel in the guilt of this much hated figure in history. The end of the book itself hinted at by the master recounting the story of Pontius Pilate: "Pilate was rushing to its end and Pilate was rushing to its end, to its end” The notion that everything will be alright in the end is very notable. “Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.” However, besides the thematic representations, Bulgakov does take a very logical seat in the accounting of the story of Pontius Pilate, separating it from the very fantastical descriptions and colourful essence that is omniscient in the rest. Allowing the readers to view the conviction and sentencing of Yeshua Ha-Nozri from a very logical point of view, very different from the mythical approaches that is commonly encountered, and finally, the guilt wrecked breakdown of the procurator. Thus, providing a very human touch to the proceedings. Mephistopheles, Satan, Devil, Professor Woland is perhaps the most colourful and inspiring character in The Master and the Margarita. He is the benevolent Devil. The force toppling, or rather freezing, the hierarchy in Moscow with the ensuing antics. The character throws a strange light over the political and social identity of the time, encapsulating the fear and an overseering examples of heroism, or acts of hedonism depending on which side of the rope you are on. And doing all of these in style. But, my favourite character is Behemoth. The demon who loves violence, a court jester and the poltergeist. Of course, he is a cat! (hide spoiler)]
—Annie
The Chicago Tribune wrote: “The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative and poignant, and everywhere full of rich descriptive passages.”Hilarious and contemplative my ass, CT. This book is an interminable slog.Look, here’s the deal. I get that this book satirizes 1930s Stalinist Russia, and I get that—for some—this earns The Master and Margarita a place on their “works-of-historical-importance” shelves. But for me, it earns nothing. I mean, let’s just call a spade a spade, shall we? There are articles in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that have more successfully held my attention than this Bulgakovian bore. (Exhibit A)To start, the characterization in this book is near zero. Although there is a point where some barely discernable personality traits become apparent in one or two of the characters, by the time the reader makes it this far the show is nearly over. And if by curtain call the reader discovers Woland and his retinue to be even remotely interesting, it is not because of careful character construction. It’s more like the end of a really stuffy dinner party when you begin making your parting rounds. The thrill is in the palpability of finally being free of these people. Toodle-oo!And what is the author’s intent here, to single out the literary bureaucrats and the nouveaux riche? If so, the demographic is not effectively targeted. The Faustian demon who comes to wreak havoc across Moscow does so seemingly at random, with little adherence to agenda. Bartenders, ticket sellers, poets, little old ladies—they are all ambushed. It is clear someone needs to take a lesson from Omar Little, who “ain’t never put no gun on no citizen.”Whatever. I’m tired of even writing about this book. Before we part, though, I’ll leave you with several examples of yet another unworthy aspect of this novel: its ridiculous sentences. Here are some of my favorites. To tell the truth, it took Arkady Apollonovich not a second, not a minute, but a quarter of a minute to get to the phone. I ask this question in complete earnestness: is this supposed to be funny? I have absolutely no idea. Quite naturally there was speculation that he had escaped abroad, but he never showed up there either. Huh? The bartender drew his head into his shoulders, so that it would become obvious that he was a poor man. Yeah, I give. I don’t even pretend to understand what this means. Anyhoo, hey—it’s been a pleasure meeting you all; we should do this again soon. Toodle-oo!
—Jason
I knew that this was going to be a book that I loved the moment I learned that Satan was the main character. This is not due to any particular affinity for devil worship on my part, but because I love Tricksters in literature and in Western civilization you don't get a better trickster than the devil. Watching him turn Stalinist Moscow on its head proved to be one of the most amusing and engrossing things I've read all year.From the moment he first materializes as the black magician Woland at a pond and predicts the impending death of the renowned writer he meets there (after listening to the writer's various proofs as to why there can not be an actual god), the devil inspires a plague of madness as increasingly odd and impossible events occur to shock the strictly rational, science-based, citizens. Whether hosting a seance that leaves the ladies of Moscow in the street wearing nothing but their undergarments, teleporting hapless theatre owners to Yalta or haunting telephone lines, Woland and his retinue of demonic cohorts know exactly how to play upon the foibles of human nature and prove rather easily that, regardless of what the Soviets may claim about their forced evolution of humanity, humans are just as greedy, gullible, and ridiculous as they ever were. The heart of the book, however, belongs to the titular Master. An author hounded to the madhouse by the rabid criticisms leveled on his masterpiece by the Moscow literati, his book within the book about the Crucifixion from the point of view of Pontius Pilate is what I've found sticking with me in the days since finishing. It's no easy feat to make a sympathetic character of a bureaucrat who has been so forcefully demonized over the past two millennia but Bulgakov (and through him, the Master) performs an excellent bit of magic and you find yourself really feeling for Pilate as he is manipulated by forces outside of his control into killing Christ, who is sad that his apostle, Matthew, is twisting his words while recording them.While there are definitely a handful of moments where I wish I would have known more about Stalinist Russia, the state-approved entertainer's guilds and the ever-present fear of the police in order to better understand Bulgakov's satire, I still had a rollicking good time while reading this and it stands up next to Crime & Punishment as one of my favorite works of Russian literature.
—Chloe
