The Reading List: The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita,

or,

I Guess I Can Read a Book in Less Than a Month After All!

[For how The Reading List project write-ups work, check here.]

Why Read The Master and Margarita?

I'll be honest: I had never even heard of either Bulgakov or The Master and Margarita when the polls opened for The Reading List. It was not among my original suggestions, but got written in, so to speak, by Mrs.5000. She called it "a bitter, fantastical romp that keeps reinventing itself as it goes along—a surefire godfather to Murakami's work, far as I'd guess, in its crazy stew of the impossible and the banal."

Meaghan, whose book recommendations are not to be sneezed at, chimed in: "it's got flying on brooms and devils and Pontius Pilate and sadness and beauty and strangeness." "Excellent," said Patrick; "amazing," said Vida; "scandalous," said Sarah. By the time the dust settled, I was so excited I voted for it myself, and it ended up getting the most votes in the category of post-1950 novels, despite having been written in the 1930s. An appropriate trick for this mischievous book to have pulled.

Translation

Feeling that I could have done a lot better choosing a translation of The Brothers Karamazov, I spent some time researching the relative merits of the various versions of The Master and Margarita. Based on this research, I ended up buying my own copy of the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Conner (pictured above) when I realized that all of the copies at our library are of other, apparently lesser, versions. I was very happy with my version, which used a snappy, natural English and had some of the most helpful annotative notes (by Ellendea Proffer) that I ever seen, in any book. Sweet!

Summary

The Devil went down to Moscow, he was looking for a soul to steal. Or was he? Bulgakov's Devil eludes our expectations of a Satanic presence, and although you can't exactly say that no one gets hurt during his visit, he seems much more prankish than traditionally evil. Like some kind of moral martial arts master, he delights in luring people into exposing their own petty vices and cruelties. He torments the wicked, in a way, but he seems more disappointed than delighted in their wickedness. This is not, apparently, your father's Satan.

A second plot woven through the book involves Pontius Pilate and somebody named Yeshua, who seems awfully familar but who also defies expectations. Is he who we think, or is he someone else entirely, or maybe both? Bulgakov gives us plenty of clues, but never enough to be certain about anything. He is messing with us, in really interesting ways.

The book was written and is set in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a period that the annotator refers to, reasonably enough, as "The Terror." Bulgakov, who apparently had very low expectations that the book could ever be published (as it wasn't, until 1966, and even then in a censored abridgement), comments wryly throughout on the grotesque distortions of social life under Stalinism. From the opening pages, where a pompous editor corrects an inept poet at comical length for failing to properly establish the historical non-existance of Jesus Christ in his work, he attacks political correctness (the old-school Soviet version, of which the petty stuff we carp about today is but a triffling shadow). As the book procedes, he will take aim at communal housing, the use of assylums to incarcerate people with subversive opinions, pampered regime-sponsored writers, the petty corruption and mutual suspicion that pervade communist Moscow from top to bottom, and the disquieting tendency of people to disappear suddenly and without explanation. Since all of this is handled in a supernatural context -- remember, this is a story about the Devil -- the social critique is simultaneous disturbing, surreal, and very funny. In The Master and Margarita, everything disturbing is also comical, and everything that is funny is also sad.

Style Points

When I started Master, Chance and d worried that I was jumping back into "heavy allegorical Soviet lit" and "dreary Russian authors" too soon after The Brothers Karamazov. I was worried about that too, but it was soon obvious that we could all relax. Bulgakov (at least when filtered through Burgin and O'Connor) writes beautifully, the allegory leavened by a sparkling humor and the dreariness of the social commentary rendered very palatable by the crazy weirdness that crops up wherever Satan and his retinue wander. And the weirdness is pretty sublime: women riding across the sky on the backs of priggish neighbors who have been transformed into flying pigs, women fighting over fancy clothing that later vanishes while they are wearing it in public; a witches' ball attended by dead evil doers who arrive as corpses falling down the chimney into a huge fireplace. Awesome. Bulgakov writes, basically, in the comic style I'm always trying for myself -- with an exagerated, playful formality, often about seemingly trivial things, with a cumulatively profound effect. Needless to say, he manages to be a whole lot funnier, and infinitely more profound, than I will ever be.

The structure of the book is quite odd, and contributes to your off-kilter sense of not knowing quite what to expect next. In general, things get increasingly more fantastic, even hallucinatory, as the book progresses. The twining of the main narrative with the Pontius Pilate sections, similarly, becomes stranger and more intricate the deeper in you go. The characters of the Master and Margarita have to be among the least dominant title characters in all of fiction, entering the action only in Chapter 13 (of 32) and never really stealing the stage from the Devil and his oddball companions (who, I should mention, include a giant black cat that talks, walks on its hind legs, and is if anything more mischevous than his boss). Margarita is a much more vivid and interesting character than The Master, incidently, the latter a Bulgakov-like writer with several apparently semi-autobiographical qualities.

The Reading List Project Bears Fruit!

There are references here and there in Master to The Brothers Karamazov, another Russian novel that features (albeit more obliquely) a visitation by the Devil. The cool thing is, I caught 'em! Or at least some of 'em! Undoubtedly there were plenty of references to other great Russian novels that I haven't read, too, but my point is, already at Book #2, the Reading List Project has enhanced my appreciation of literature! w00t!

The other conspicuous commonality between Master and Brothers is that they are both simply CRAMMED with idiomatic phrases that invoke the Devil. In both novels, you start to feel a little worn out by the repetition "the Devil only knows," "to the Devil with you," "having a devil of a time," "like the devil's own {whatever}," and so on. The notes in my copy of Master explain that Russian has a lot more of those phrases than English do, and a lot of word roots that kind of suggest devilry, so an translator is obliged to really pack in an English equivalent whenever the opportunity presents itself.

CONCLUSIONS

Not exactly an easy read, The Master and Margarita is nevertheless entertaining and fun. If you can handle surreality and a certain dryness of tone -- if you like Saramago, or Eco, or Calvino, or Murakami, or any of those South American dudes -- I think you'll enjoy it. Worth reading in and of itself; secondarily an interesting and humane look into life under totalitarian rule during the darkest era of the Soviet state.

...and

I'll be reading off-list this weekend and through the coming week. Meanwhile, a short subset of the master list is on its way to L&TM5K dork Gray, who I will ask to take a turn of selecting the next book.