Book Review - Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita
Published by: Penguin Classics
Publication Date: 1967
Format: Paperback, 448 Pages
Rating: ★
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How does the devil prove that he exists? By proving the existence of God. Satan, in the guise of one Professor Woland, arrives in Moscow with his retinue. His companions are Koroviev, his valet, Behemoth, a black cat who walks on two legs, Azazello, a hitman, and Hella, a vampire. Their goal is to sew chaos and confusion. Woland targets the head of the Massolit, Berlioz, a corrupt toady. Berlioz embraces Soviet atheism and is in a heated discussion with the poet Bezdomny about how Jesus is a mythical figure. Woland, needing to prove his own existence, tells Berlioz that he will be decapitated by a Russian woman. Finding this death prophecy absurd it comes as quite a shock when Berlioz slips in the street and his head is forcibly removed from his body by a tram car driven by a woman. Bezdomny sees this as the proof Woland promised and is driven insane trying to stop the spread of their evil while warning his fellow citizens. He ends up being committed to an asylum. This is where Bezdomny meets the Master. The Master is a failed writer who was working on a book on the life of Pontius Pilate that was rejected by the Soviet state. Driven insane by critics he burned his manuscript and forsook his love, Margarita. Poor Margarita. She is about to fall under the spell of Woland, just as all of Moscow has with his show performed at the Variety theater. Azazello gives her the power of invisibility and invites her to his master's ball. There Woland gifts her with witchcraft. She flies through the night, over rivers and forests, and arrives to be hostess of Satan's spring ball, welcoming the luminaries of hell. All she asks for in return is to be reunited with the Master. They will spend an eternity together. In hell. The ball ends. The spirits all depart. Moscow is free. As is Pontius Pilate, whose story has also come to an end, and now he too can walk beside Yeshua.
Ah, the greats of Russian literature. Tolstoy is epic, you could literally bludgeon someone to death with one of his book. Chekhov is annoying, trust me on this, once you watch an undergraduate production of Three Sisters or reread The Cherry Orchard ad infinitum for a semester you will want to travel back in time to stop him from ever having written a word. Pasternak is basically why I exist. And Bulgakov is surrealist art in prose form. I think. I mean it's the only way I can make any kind of sense of whatever this is I just read. Wait, was this supposed to be funny? Oh, it's supposed to be darkly funny with a Faustian twist. Yeah, totally didn't get that. The humor that is, the Faustian part is kind of obvious. And the thing is, this is a book I felt somehow intimidated by for years but after watching the adaptation of Bulgakov's A Young Doctor's Notebook I thought that I had a handle on his humor. I was wrong. And I also shouldn't have been intimidated. Because this book is a whole lot of nothing. Sure, you can make it into something, you can analyze the Christian imagery and parse the text and basically find a way to justify whatever your point of view is, but in my mind a book can't just be there for scholars to spar over. There has to be a story, there has to be something more. The one part of the book I liked was the glimpse we got into the Master and Margarita's life before he went insane and she became a witch. That was sweet and harrowing and bored everyone in my book club. They were all about the cat and the witches and seriously, how did I not like this book? There's an anthropomorphic cat! But Behemoth was just somehow too creepy for me. Too mean. And I know cat haters out there will say, but that's just a cat. I'm sorry, but no. No it's not. And as for Pontius Pilate... Why is there basically historical fiction about the life of Jesus intercut with the devil in Moscow? And don't say because it's all biblical. Because it feels like unnecessary filler. Like an idea for another book that was just grafted onto this one. In the end, who cares? Not me. Those who decry that everyone should read and love the classics are partially right. They should read them to find out their own tastes. And this book left a bad taste in my mouth.
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