Rating: 🐈⬛👹
The Master and Margarita is a book by Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian and Soviet author and playwright.
This is the first book that I’ve read in a while where I thought to myself pretty early on “I bet there’s a lot of PhD dissertations on this book..”. That being said, it was no overintellectualized literary slog to get through! Most of the time it was a joy to read, and I would heartily recommend it to others. Now that I have finished the novel, it’s only more fascinating to learn about Bulgakov’s life and the context surrounding its creation. As usual, spoilers ahead.
The Master and Margarita takes place primarily in Moscow during the 1930’s, where Bulgakov lived during the 12 years it took him to write this novel. The secondary setting is Jerusalem during the time of Christ’s crucifixion.
Part One of the book focuses on the arrival of Professor Woland (the Devil) and his entourage in Moscow. They wreak havoc on a number of notable people who live in an artist’s collective called the Griboyedov House and work for the Moscow Association of Writers (MASSOLIT) and the Variety Theater. I was especially struck with the opening Berlioz/Homeless/Woland sequence, the conversation between Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha Nozri (Christ), and Woland’s show at the Variety Theater, where a man’s head is ripped off then reattached, money rains from the sky, and women from the audience change into luxurious new clothing only to have it disappear from their bodies as they exit the show. In ancient Jerusalem, Ha Nozri is stabbed to death on the cross and his body is rescued by Matthew Levi.
In Part Two, more than halfway through the book, we finally learn who the Master and Margarita are: the Master is a ruined author, and Margarita his lover. The chapters in Part 1 featuring Ha Nozri and Pilate in Jerusalem are, in fact, excerpts from the Master’s own manuscript that he burned in a fire after critics panned it. Margarita is gifted a skin cream by one of Satan’s retinue, and it makes her young, healthy, and able to fly naked on a broomstick over Moscow. She arrives at the Devil’s Spring Ball, where she acts as the Queen of the ball, greeting all the ghostly murderers and thieves attending. As a reward for doing a great job as Queen, Satan gifts her and the Master their old life together again. The Devil also provides them the Master’s reincarnated manuscript, coining a famous phrase with “Manuscripts don’t burn!”.
The book itself is bizarre and delightful. What I enjoyed the most were the fantastical scenes: Woland’s show at the Variety, Margarita flying over Moscow as a delirious witch, and the Devil’s Ball. The most difficult part of this reading for me was tracking the social web of characters and subplots. A combination of reading the book on and off over a couple months, the unfamiliarity, and therefore perceived similarity, of the Russian names, and the volume and transience of characters all made it difficult for me to keep things straight in my head.
The context in which Bulgakov wrote the book is fascinating, and clarifies a number of recurring themes. Bulgakov had simultaneous success, criticism, and suppression in Soviet Russia, having play adaptations of his earlier works show many times in Moscow theater. Stalin himself was a fan and somewhat a personal friend of Bulgakov’s as a result. But Bulgakov was critical of the Soviet lifestyle, from the economic issues around housing to freedom of expression and what he viewed as a shallow mainstream atheism common among the literary elite. Many of his works were never published due to government censorship, sitting in his desk drawer until his death.
He spent the last 12 years of his life working on The Master and Margarita. Two years into the endeavor, in a fit of despair about his lack of confidence in the quality of the work so far as well as his certainty that it would never be allowed to be published anyway, Bulgakov burned the only manuscript in a fire. This first copy had no Master or Margarita, and was titled “The Engineer’s Hoof”. A year later, he began work on the book anew, taking elements from memory from his first attempt as well as inserting new story points, including, presumably, the Master’s destruction of his fictional book by fire.
Upon his death, four different versions of final manuscripts existed, none of them being the definitive copy, and the final uncensored published version, released in Paris after being smuggled there decades after Bulgakov’s death, included elements from each. In the years before his death, Bulgakov penned his own thoughts on the book:
‘What’s its future?’ you ask? I don’t know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my ‘killed’ plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don’t know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest…"
He gave a reading of the entire book to close friends, and one of the attendees later wrote:
“When he finally finished reading that night, he said: ‘Well, tomorrow I am taking the novel to the publisher!’ and everyone was silent”, “…Everyone sat paralyzed. Everything scared them. [Another attendee] later at the door fearfully tried to explain to me that trying to publish the novel would cause terrible things”
There’s just so much to unpack with The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov inserts some of his own views into the Devil’s words, critiquing shallow atheism and the failures of Soviet values and economics through satire and cruelty. The Master is a fairly transparent representation of himself as well, facing critical failure and destructive self-doubt. Apparently the extravagant Devil’s Spring Ball was based on a real-life experience Bulgakov had attending Ambassador William Bullitt’s house party where he borrowed a number of animals from the zoo for guest entertainment amongst other complex displays of hedonism. I absolutely loved Behemoth, the Devil’s Black Cat companion, who takes on the role of a Shakesperian jester with more bite. The footnotes mention many references to Faust, which I know nothing about.
If you want a wild ride with as much depth as you’re willing to give it, I’d say check this one out.