Amazon has been telling me to buy this book for ages, much as it did with Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Then I noticed folks on Reddit recomending it, although to be honest folks on Reddit end up recomending everything to read. Eventually I bought it. On a trip I noticed that my wife’s neice had a copy, so I asked her about it. She’d only read a bit of it so far. Mumble mumble mumble.
I’ve been meaning to read it for all these years now, so I finally did. It’s kind of a satire. The trouble with that is you must be aware of the thing that is being satirised or you just don’t get it. The Master and Margarita takes place in ~1930 Soviet Moscow. I’ve seen a couple different Dr Zhivago movies, so I know that housing was crazy after the revolution. Multiple families lived in a single aparment. Multiple unrelated families. But you know what, that’s about the limit of my knowledge.
I didn’t find most of the book to be funny, or even coherent. There are some very interesting parts, and images, and phrases that stick with me, but the whole was very confusing. The main story takes place when the devil comes to Moscow, and the mayhem that insues. I didn’t realize that most of the folks deserved the mayhem that they got. A lot of them were Party toadies doing toady things to people.
A major part of the book is a retelling of Jesus and Pilot and that whole crucifixion thing. But because the USSR as an atheist country, Jesus’ name is a little different, as well as Jerusalem’s and Matthew’s and Judas’s. But Pilot’s name is right on. This is the not so satirical portion of the book.
So a few pages later, back in Moscow, somebody gets their head cut off. Oh, I know! I know this part! This is a metaphor for John the Baptist, right? Nope. Apparently not. I was getting it all wrong, all of it.
One of the quirks of the book is that a lot of the Russian characters are named after classical composers. While I know these composer’s names and some of their works, I really never had a face for their names. So I was just confusing all the characters with each other, because they were all “that composer guy”.
I also misunderstood the part where Pilot is trying to warn Judas that someone wants to kill him. So it’s not just the Russian names that confounded me.
By the time I got to the end it was coming together for me. But I really had to struggle through the book. And I really couldn’t tell you why it’s considered to be such a great book.
So I bought another book, called A Reader’s Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. And boy did this help! ONe of the last things it told me was that the translation that I’d chose, by Pevear and Volokhonsky, was one to be avoided. It suggested the Burgin and O’Connor version or the one by Hugh Aplin. So I could blame it all on that, if I wished.
Honestly, though, I just think that you had to be there. If you knew about Soviet Russia, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s story and the folks he hung out with, then it is an amazing book! It’s amazing that it got written during Stalin’s reign. It’s amazing that it got published in 1970. It’s amazing that we got any more-or-less complete manuscripts at all!
And once you know what’s going on, it’s worth reading for sure. I wouldn’t read the Reader’s Companion first though, as it ruins all the plot surprises. So, if I were me, I’d read the book, then the Companion, then read the book again right away to get the full effect.But I’m not that version of me, and I seldom read books a second time, especially not soon after reading them the first time. So maybe sometime I’ll give it a second try, and maybe I’ll remember enough of the background information to make it more worth it.
And maybe I’ll write down their names, so I can keep track of who is who. I’ve seen character lists in old Ellery Queen books, I think. You keep flipping back to the page to figure out who is whom. I tell myself all the time to do this, but never do.
So my last point about the Master and Magarita: The guy writes a book that is different than the accepted version, and gets the girl. This is incredibly like The History of the Seige of Lisbon by Jose Saramago, but not really.
