Name? Yeshua - the accused
replied quickly. - Do you have a surname? - Hanozri - Where are you from? The
city of Gamala - the prisoner replied with a movement of his head that indicated, to his right, towards the north, there was a city called Gamala. - What race are you? - I don't know exactly - replied the accused, - I don't remember my parents. I was told that my father was Syrian... I discovered The Master and Margherita in my twenties, and I immediately wondered why this book wasn't
read in schools instead of I Promessi Sposi. Bulgakov's writing is ironic and tragic, richly allegorical (it is obvious that the miracle performed by Voland and Co in the theatre, producing money out of nowhere and elegant clothes etc., which then vanish, symbolises the promises that the Government didn't keep). His perception of the more fantastical side of (not only Russian) life keeps this
work from ever dating because there are always new revelations to be found. He began it in 1928 and the first part of The Master was ready by 1933, however, in 1934 the author introduced a new character, Margherita. This brought forth a very complex work which Bulgakov worked on until the end of his days. He died from a terrible illness on 10th March 1940, leaving behind him several unedited manuscripts. Unfortunately, Russian readers had to wait a further thirty
years until they could read The Master and Margherita: it was finally published in Moskva magazine in 1966/7 to immediate acclaim. Right from the opening pages, various portentous events take place in Moscow, a city governed by materialism, utilitarianism and atheism of the worst kind. Usng the most grotesque brushstrokes (a style likened to Goya by the critic Koverin), Bulgakov paints a picture of the forces of evil, not embodied by demons, but by ordinary people. The Devil is Messer Voland or Woland, a mysterious and possibly teutonic "tourist".
Speaking of Satan, and suchlike, when I first read this book, I was already aware of the monumental Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, and I immediately presumed that Bulgakov had "learned his trade" from the Lubeckian writer. How wrong I was! Doctor Faustus (which, you may or may not know, is no easy read) was published seven years after the death of Bulgakov. To me, The Master and Margherita seemed a more contemporary and modern work. In fact, the Moscow of the nineteen thirties, with is lights and frenetic pace is much closer to our reality than that of Adrian Leverkuhn (the main character of Mann's Faustus). Written during the most tragic twelve years of Russian history, and plagued by the madness of Stalin's persecutions, this work of Bugakov's was left unfinished in any defined way. the last chapters of the first volume do not seem to have been fully revised. The life of Doctor Mihail Afanasevic Bulgakov was not an easy one. He was suffocated by the political climate, and kept firmly under the watch of Stalin himself. His novel The White Guard, and his civil war play Escape were both labelled anti soviet... In The Master and Margherita, a simple poem (the love between an intellectual and the beautiful Margherita, the "cameos" of Jesus' imprisonment and Pontius Pilate's guilt) is drowned in a reality as black and consuming as tarmac. The extreme realism distorts everything, every event, into a delicious surrealism.
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