Bottom Line: Never heard of it? Read it. Heard of it but skipped it? Read it.
I was visiting Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City with a good friend who hails from Russia. She comes up to me with this odd-looking book whose illustrated cover features half the face of a woman and half the face of a cat smoking a cigarette. “You HAVE to get this,” she tells me. Unsure of what I was saying yes to, I nonetheless accept it, and the young man behind the register is instantly excited for me. He gleefully shares that the book is in his top two all-time favorites of Russian literature. Encouraged by these two endorsements, I thought how bad could it be?
I answer that with a single word: wow.
It is difficult to overstate the power, poignancy, creativity, and sheer passion I found in these pages.
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For those unaware as I was, The Master & Margarita is the stunning master work of Mikhail Bulgakov. Written during the teeth of the Stalin era, it was published in 1966, long after the death of the writer in 1940. It is a punishing, laugh-out-loud satire of Soviet society and its literary establishment of the day. It tells the story of Satan and his unabashed entourage coming to Moscow for a series of performances as a professor of black magic arts, set to perform a limited run at a major theater. It also features the story of “the master,” himself a writer, and his beloved Margarita, who have been separated by circumstances but not by loss of love. Also woven in the text is the master’s own work: a ridiculed telling of Pontius Pilate and his pivotal pronouncement of death to the ill-fated Yeshua Ha-Nozri, known to us as Jesus of Nazareth.
There is a host of characters presented throughout the novel’s primary story, set in Moscow. They fall into four main categories: Satan, here dubbed Woland (the German word for Satan) and his retinue; those connected to the Variety theater, where Woland performs; the master and Margarita themselves; and the self-flattering intelligentsia who have the misfortune of first encountering Woland–and who also torpedoed the master’s career and ultimately landed him in a psychiatric facility. Also ever-present and deliberately near-faceless is the government establishment tasked with investigating–and then explaining–the relentless parade of inexplicable and chaotic events that erupt across the city in Woland’s wake.
Masterfully intertwined with all this is the “story within the story,” the master’s novel about Pontius Pilate and the kind-hearted “mad prophet” set in Jerusalem in the days preceding and immediately following the crucifixion.
Holy Swing for the Fence, Batman!
It is difficult to overstate the power, poignancy, creativity, and sheer passion I found in these pages. It absolutely skewers the greed, corruption, and hypocrisy of the Russian elite; Woland is portrayed as shockingly honest when compared to those in various positions of power (real or imagined) throughout the city. The city’s avarice is openly and consistently exploited; and while the occasional everyday person is swept up in the shenanigans, the majority of the city’s pain is self-inflicted.
It’s also a deeply personal book, as the master’s pain and disillusionment mirror the author’s own. Bulgakov, like the master, once burned his own manuscript, distraught that prospects of it ever seeing publication were remote in the oppressive political climate. Bulgakov’s stinging critique of Stalin’s Russia is on full-display: there are repeated sly but bitter nods to people being detained or “disappeared” in response to crimes or suspicion of crimes; some harsh realities of Soviet life–like communal living, the danger of being caught with foreign currency, the steep price of being declared an “enemy of the state”--are laced throughout the novel with a sadness that feels sometimes resigned, sometimes vitriolic.
But the author manages to make the angry journey also a poetically beautiful one. The various settings–Moscow, Jerusalem, and the fantasy regions where Woland travels–are rich with imagery. Architecture, landmarks, bodies of water, moonlight, fires, darkness, sunrise and sunset, all figure prominently throughout. Seemingly from the first page onward, there are numerous references to art, culture, history, and philosophy; the author’s voice is not only personal, but also highly sophisticated.
Moscow and Jerusalem–both the cities themselves and stories they contain–richly mirror and contrast with each other. Among the most striking aspects for me personally is the very nature of the A and B stories themselves. The A-story is a fantastic, almost farcical tale centered around the Devil himself and his demonic rag-tag crew, one of whom is an enormous and highly-anthropomorphized cat given to drinking, sarcasm, and fits of violence. The B-story, in contrast, is an intimate tale of the crucifixion from one man’s perspective in staunchly atheistic terms; the word “God” is never used, and there is no hint of Christian mythology or mysticism. It makes for an absolutely fascinating juxtaposition.
Still Relevant
Much more can, and should, be written about The Master & Margarita. For instance, I find its relevance to the present day outright shocking. How Bulgakov depicts the government establishment re-framing the widely-experienced destruction left in Woland’s wake is eerily similar in spirit to current efforts to re-cast the January 6 Capitol riot. Nearly a century later and a continent away, similarities persist.
In closing, I admit I read the novel in part out of curiosity for my friend’s culture, but what I feel I got was a look into the author’s soul; in it I saw the Russia he loved, grieved over, and demanded more from. I saw his determination to speak out, even if it was from the grave. Cowardice, he wrote, was “the worst of all sin.” It is clear to me that Mikhail Bulgakov was determined to show his countrymen bravery to the end, no matter what.
It’s an astounding book.
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