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! ( )

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! ( )

brilliant, fantastic satirical novel, but not a quick read. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )