The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov
This is the second Russian novel I’ve liked, but probably not as much as I should have.
I always get a little antsy writing my comments about famous books, because there’s so much pressure to agree that these works are indeed classic. If you didn’t like it, the silent implication goes, then you just didn’t understand it. Well, I know that there was a lot of this book I missed. For one thing, I read it in English, and I gather that the Russian style is subtle, unusual, and doesn’t translate well. (For example, Russian has freer word order than English due to its case system, and this apparently is used in this novel for artistic effect.) For another, the whole re-writing of story of Pontius Pilot is mostly lost on me because, not being a Christian, I never studied the original. Also, the book is a subtle yet scathing critique of Stalinist Moscow, a time and place somewhat out of my experience.
Still, there lovely things going on here that I did catch. On a surface level, the book is lively, funny, and the devil’s entourage produces wonderfully described havoc throughout Moscow. I especially liked the sumptuous Ball, which ends up spanning several chapters. The devil himself is also a great character, much richer than the usual stereotypes. In fact, there is a noticeable streak of compassion in him. More fundamentally, there are philosophical hints throughout the book that “good” and “evil” are not really as distinct as we might think. Very postmodern, for a book written in the 1930s. The character of Jesus is similarly nuanced and sympathetic, portrayed as neither a messiah nor a fool, but something in between, a cheerful but worldly philosopher who believes in the essential goodness of man.
There is also extreme cleverness in the critique of the moronic ideological blandness of communism under Stalin. Bulgakov had to please the censors — not mention stay out of jail — so there is nothing at all blunt. It’s all brilliantly deniable, but piercing nonetheless. For example, the poet Ivan Homeless realizes after his encounter with the devil that all of his poetry up until now has been terrible. The way that Bulgakov handles it, this is not unhappiness but the joyous realization of truth — and also a sly crack against the communist system, because Homeless has been writing brainless ideological sermons until now. The novel is in general filled with characters coming alive through their contact with the supernatural; the fact that imaginary forces are needed to make this happen is its own kind of critique of the oppression under which the author lived.
Anyway. It’s a good book. It’s wildly imaginative and extremely rich. I’d like to come back to it when I have a little more context. Also, be aware that the translation matters. I started with the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and found it a bit stiff and awkward when I later compared it to the (earlier) work of Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor.
