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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
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The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

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Showing 1-5 of 120 (next | show all)
The devil is unleashed in Stalinist Moscow. The funny thing is that while the devil kills, maims and causes havoc throughout the city, he is very far from a traditional definition of evil. In fact, the character struck me as being more like an avenging angel, punishing people for various sins such as cowardice, greed, vanity or lust.

There is a further subversion of expectations later in the novel when Margarita makes a pact with the devil to find the character she calls the Master. We are so used to Faustian pacts throughout literature and popular culture that the assumption is that it will work out badly – which it does in a way, but not in the way that you’d expect. The devil is more true to his word than most of the human characters in the book, and doesn’t require much in return for his favours.

Cowardice seems to be chief among Bulgakov’s targets, which is understandable given the times in which the novel was written. In Stalinist Russia, as under any dictatorship, the choice between cowardice and death would have been a frequent one, and the majority necessarily chose the former. There are frequent allusions to Soviet life: sudden disappearances, bureaucratic entities with ridiculous compound names, etc. I suspect that many of the characters are thinly-veiled versions of Russian writers and critics of the day, too, but my knowledge of 1920s/30s Russian literati doesn’t allow me to get the references. Still, it doesn’t matter – there’s plenty more going on here.

In fact, it’s the kind of book that you could probably read several times and get new layers of meaning each time. The character of Pontius Pilate appears throughout the book, including at the beginning and the end, and was the subject of a book written by the Master and a story told by the devil to prove the existence of Jesus to a doubting literature professor just before he predicts (or engineers?) the professor’s decapitation by a tram. Decapitation is a repeated motif, as are sin and punishment.

One thing I found amazing about the book was that I believed in the characters and the action, even when it was absolutely absurd, as it frequently was. I think Bulgakov achieved this by focusing on the ordinary aspects of the situation, not on the absurd. For example, when a cat jumps on a subway car and attempts to pay ten kopecks to the conductress, Bulgakov adds in little details like the fact that he grabbed hold of a handrail and paid through a window “open on account of the stuffiness”. By reminding readers of familiar things like this, he makes the situation seem more real. I know it probably still sounds absurd when taken out of context like this, but in the book itself it worked, trust me! ( )
1 vote AndrewBlackman | Jan 23, 2010 |
The devil comes to play in Moscow and punish the wicked, jealous and gluttonous in this Russian classic. Satan and his conspicuous entourage casually cause havoc to erupt throughout the city in an attempt to wake up the population to the evil that modern day activity has made routine. Dry and witty, The Master and the Margarita re-invents the devil and his light counterpart as two balancing, rather than opposing forces. Excellent! ( )
1 vote bespectacledbug | Jan 13, 2010 |
brilliant, fantastic satirical novel, but not a quick read. ( )
  echaika | Jan 12, 2010 |
Mainly I read this because I'm always coming across references to the story, and it helps to know what they're talking about. And of course it turned out there were scads of refs I'd read without knowing they were refs (ie, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing). Social satire isn't generally my thing, but this was well done. The long lists of pranks weren't particularly interesting/fun, and that was practically half the book, but the Pilate part was fantastic. ( )
  kristenn | Jan 10, 2010 |
The definition of 'classic' often seems to be 'that book that everyone can recognize but no one has read. A classic in literature is a title you find on the reading lists of unfortunate high school students, or on 'best of' collections, or books you mean to read merely because you have seen one in every book store you have ever entered.

The Master and Margarita is an invisible classic. It belongs to that numberless crowd of books that has been passed up in English 101, its author uninvoked by amateurs flexing the literary muscles at each other (Oh yeah, Tolstoy. He did, like, War and Peace right?), its lines unmissquoted (I think you protest to much!), its genius undiscovered by any but those who stumble upon it like a gem in the gray bedrock of the 'literary fiction' section. But it is there, available, waiting for people to discover it after decades of censorship, suppression, and obscurity among the reading masses.

I stumbled upon this book through librarything (thank you librarything!) It was a suggested group read, and since I had worn out my other travelling book I ducked into a bookstore and picked this up. The first thing that told me I had been missing out was the cashier, who told me she really wanted to read M&M herself. Of course she must feel that way about most of the books in the store, I said, but at this she gave me a serious look and said no, not at all. She meant -this- book.

Now my interest was piqued. On the train I cracked it open and found myself enchanted by what I read. The devil in Moscow? What an odd premise. What chaos! What revelry! What imagination! What the hell is going on? I checked up with the group that had suggested the book. Mention was being made of scathing criticism, of deep things left unsaid between the lines of the story. I saw none of this, having no experience in soviet history or literature, and did some sleuthing.

It turns out that there is a great deal of academic criticism written about this book, and much of it was fascinating. The juxtaposition of absurdity and reality in the two main narratives makes the 'real world' of Moscow feel like the impossibility and the 'fable' of Jesus' last days an everyday event. The invisibility of the secret police was so expertly handled that their saturation in the plot had to be pointed out to me, and then I hit myself for not seeing them. The cast of characters, a veritable parade of them, were not only amusing, but representative of great ideals; faith, cowardice, intellectual dishonesty, illusion and illumination were all personified by the cast of M&M.

You can read M&M and enjoy it completely without realizing that you are grazing on top of a goldmine. It's a shame that high school students are not subjected to this book more often. M&M deserves to be misquoted and name-dropped by every Lit 101 student out there. I'd say that Master and Margarita is without a doubt my favorite read from 2009. ( )
4 vote bokai | Jan 7, 2010 |
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Epigraph
...and so who are
you, after all?

—I am part of the power
which forever wills evil
and forever works good.

Goethe's Faust
‘Say at last — who art thou?’

‘That Power I serve
Which wills forever evil
Yet does forever good.’

Goethe, Faust
...Так кто ж ты, наконец?

— Я — часть той силы,
что вечно хочет
зла и вечно совершает благо.

Гете. “Фауст”
Dedication
First words
One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds.
At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch’s Ponds.
Однажды весною, в час небывало жаркого заката, в Москве, на Патриарших
прудах, появились два гражданина.
Quotations
...manuscripts don’t burn.
Рукописи не горят.
Les manuscrits ne brûlent pas.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (3)

Barguzin River

The Master and Margarita

Woland

Book description

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0679760806, Paperback)

Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a "translator" wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off; when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: "Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.") Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection.

Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. This Master--as he calls himself--has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet--and fellow lunatic--Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. His devil is not only entertaining, he is necessary: "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?"

Unsurprisingly--in view of its frequent, scarcely disguised references to interrogation and terror--Bulgakov's masterwork was not published until 1967, almost three decades after his death. Yet one wonders if the world was really ready for this book in the late 1930s, if, indeed, we are ready for it now. Shocking, touching, and scathingly funny, it is a novel like no other. Woland may reattach heads or produce 10-ruble notes from the air, but Bulgakov proves the true magician here. The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened. --Mary Park

(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:38:17 -0500)

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