jeannemixon 's review for:

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

4.0

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I wasn't enjoying the Master and Margarita until I thought of it as a light comedy play. It really doesn't have the structure of a novel -- more of the structure of a play. It begins with two characters, an editor and a poet, in Stalinist times, discussing God and Jesus. The editor is a true communist and rebukes the poet for not being certain that God does not exist. Enter the devil and his entourage. The devil has two proofs of God's existence -- there is no devil without God, good and evil are necessary copartners and the Devil personally knew Pontius Pilate and Jesus. So the editor is summarily executed for being an unbeliever and later sent to nothingness. The Devil explains that everyone goes where they believe they will go. The poet ends up in an insane asylum after briefly serving as a ghost of the lost aristocracy with their belief in the power of icons to repel evil. He is saved and becomes a believer and is at peace in the insane asylum. The Devil wreaks havoc on the communist society -- giving women disappearing clothing and shoes and greedy bureaucrats money that transforms into foreign currency for which they are arrested as traffickers in foreign currency. But the Devil's true role is to punish the bad and reward the good. He does very little permanent damage. It becomes clear at the end that the Devil has been doing God's work.

I can see why the Soviets wouldn't like this story, but it is pretty mild by today's standards. My favorite parts were the stage show and the Satanic ball. I think there were a lot of satiric jokes about the Soviet literary community that I didn't get. There was a Virginia Woolf reference and I felt like Captain America "I got that! I got that reference!" But everything else was opaque. I'm sure there are websites I could go to that deconstruct and I did find a reference to the Griboyedov house that explained what it really was, but that is more work than I am willing to put into for this. I got the gist of the story.

There is an intense sense of sadness throughout. The Soviet art is bad art. There are denunciations, imprisonments of the sane in insane asylums, arrests of people for trafficking in foreign money who are innocent, forbidden thoughts, a new aristocracy of the people who conform. There is a great deal of fear expressed in the book -- everyone is on edge and expecting the worst. You can really feel the times.