From the Stacks Book Challenge: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

This was my first book on the “From the Stacks” challenge.

I, of course, had heard of The Master and Margarita – and Mikhail Bulgakov – just in terms of his playwriting – but I had never read the novel, and actually knew almost ZERO about it. That was part of the fun of reading this book, for me. It came with almost no preconceptions. The only preconceptions I had had to do with my knowledge of what it was like for writers and artists and THE INDIVIDUAL in Soviet Russia at that time (early 1930s). John told me a little bit about Bulgakov’s story (amazing – makes you want to cry, seriously) – and he also gave me another novel which I read promptly called The Children of the Arbat – and it has to be experienced to be believed. My own words would pale in comparison to what it is like to read that magnificent book. It deserves a post in and of itself – or a week of excerpts – but I have to say this: To any history buffs I have out there (and I know I have many) – this novel is indispensable to understanding the early Soviet terror, and the thinking behind it. It takes place in the years before the murder of Kirov – which were horrifying years in and of themselves – but the murder of Kirov was the launching pad for something even worse.

As the great Robert Conquest writes in The Great Terror: A Reassessment:

This killing [the murder of Kirov] has every right to be called the crime of the century. Over the next four years, hundreds of Soviet citizens, including the most prominent political leaders of the Revolution, were shot for direct responsibility for the assassination, and literally millions of others went to their deaths for complicity in one or another part of the vast conspiracy which allegedly lay behind it. Kirov’s death, in fact, was the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.

The more that period of history is studied, the more that Conquest’s statement cannot be denied. Kirov. Kirov is the key. Children of the Arbat has Kirov as a character – as well as Stalin (John made me read it – ha! – because he said to me, the Stalin freak, that this was, all in all, the best portrayal of the man’s thought processes that he knew of. This is no joke. The mystery of Stalin cannot be contained in or explained by factual documents – because he left almost no trace. But what made him tick? If you’re as fascinated by this question as I am, then you will not want to miss Children of the Arbat.) The inexorable moving towards the killing of Kirov is the movement of the novel – yet it is also the story of a group of young people who live in the Arbat section of Moscow, a bohemian area, full of artists, students – and what happened to all of these different characters during this crucial time in Soviet history.)

Mikhail Bulgakov comes into the story of The Children of the Arbat peripherally because he had written a play which Stalin had actually approved of. But Bulgakov was no believer. He was an artist and quite disgusted by the Soviet system. (Read more about his extraordinary life here.) As the 1920s moved along, and life became more and more unbearable for him – he finally wrote what was to be a famous letter to Stalin – saying that if the new Russia could not use his talents as a writer, and if satire was no longer welcome in his country – then could he please emigrate? Would Stalin allow him to leave?? Unbelievable, right? Satire, as we all know (and as we certainly experience in our culture now, with its stifling political correctness – from the left AND the right) suffers under any kind of repression – and yet it also flourishes only when it has something to satirize. Times of great power struggles bring about the best satire – but if a culture becomes too entranced with the LITERAL – then satire is not welcome, and even feared. It seems like the satirist is chuckling at things that the majority find sacred. (Well, fuck the majority, is what I say.) Satire is a response to the absurdity of authority. Satire is a way of letting the air out a bit. Taking those in power down a peg. They deserve it. Don’t get too big for your britches, mkay? Those who flatter themselves that they are truly important make it their business to try to repress a talented satirist. And when humor itself becomes suspect – when there is seen to be a correct way to not just speak, but THINK (and this is where we’re getting to in this culture – Powers that be, anti-art powers from all sides, are trying to regulate how we are even allowed to THINK) – then the satirist becomes even MORE threatening (and yet – to those who give a crap about freedom of speech – and freedom of thought – even more necessary). Bulgakov, as a biting critic of the totalitarian structures being erected all around him, found it more and more difficult to get work. (There are some great sections in Master and Margarita where he satirizes how easy the unionized “correct” Soviet writers had it – but only by basically selling their souls to the regime. They were pampered, with weekend dachas, perks, all that … Bulgakov is ruthless towards these “writers”.)

Stalin, amazingly, did save Bulgakov’s ass – but only because of that one play Stalin had seen that he liked. Or who knows what his motives were – but he wrote a letter to Bulgakov, telling him that no he could not leave – but he would make sure that Bulgakov worked at the Moscow Art Theatre. This period of Bulgakov’s life did not really work out that well, despite Stalin’s patronage. Bulgakov could not write anything that would get by the censors. His sensibility – romantic, biting, intelligent, funny – was far too much for the bastions of Soviet realism. So, essentially, he could get nothing published. His life was ruined. He only lived until 1940.

But he had begun a novel about the devil coming to Moscow. The premise should put a chill down your spine. If only because of its piercing genius. An entire culture – a very religious culture – declares that it is now an atheist culture. No more God. As we know, this was not as easy as it sounded – but that was the declaration. So Bulgakov, using that as his launching pad, decided to fantasize about how the Soviet Union would react if the devil showed up in their midst. How, if they were atheists, would they interpret him? How would they make sense of the devil without God? The thing that brings tears to my eyes is that Bulgakov knew that this novel could never ever be published. It was a direct criticism of the entire system. No way would it ever get by anybody. But he wrote it anyway. And – here’s the most amazing part (besides the book itself, I mean): he wrote an early draft of the book in the early 1930s. It soon became clear, as 1932, 1933, 1934 – those dreadful years – crawled by – with millions dying – that it was dangerous to even have the manuscript around. So he burned it, page by page.

And then – when it became clear that he would never get any work anyway – that his career was over – and also that he was dying (he died in 1940) – he rewrote the entire thing from memory.

I can’t even imagine.

I just can’t even imagine.

The courage of this man. The saving power of his art. I mean, it didn’t save him, and it didn’t save the millions killed by Stalin … but it was a voice. A voice. A voice that did survive the terror – and can speak to us now. It’s redemptive. How, in dark moments, dark moments of the human soul, something can be expressed which may be uttered too soon – which may not see the light of day for 80 years more – but the fact that it exists at all is reason for hope. Anne Frank’s diary is the most obvious example but there are countless other stories. Books hidden away. People persecuted for pursuing their art. And yet pursuing it anyway. Pursuiing it in secret. Hiding meanings wihtin meanings in their texts. It cannot be killed. That kind of expression cannot be killed. Even though those in power have a vested interest in killing it. In creating an environment where such things can’t flourish. And yet – they do. They do ANYway.

There’s a line in the book which has since become famous, a catch-phrase in Russia to this day: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” There are multiple levels of meaning to this statement. First of all: they obviously DO burn, since Bulgakov burned one himself. And the Master, the hero of the book, also burned a manuscript – the book he had been writing about Pontius Pilate – only the book had not burned up completely – because Margarita, his lover and greatest believer, saved the pages from the flames. And yet, on that deeper level, the human level – there is the meaning: that no, even if a manuscript is burned, it has NOT burned. It existed. The statements therein, with all their belief in humanity, in SANITY, existed. Bulgakov might not have written such a book in easier times. The price he paid, obviously, is way too high. Nobody should be completely deprived of their livelihood. But by reconstructing his manuscript – there is proof that no. Manuscripts do not burn. He died leaving the book nearly finished. Some of it is reconstructed from his notes, and there are certain errors which have not been corrected (a dude was thrown out the window, and yet later – he is seen running down the stairs – stuff like that, stuff that Bulgakov would obviously have corrected if he hadn’t died).

In terms of the scope of this one particular book, let me quote from the Afterword of my copy (indispensable reading – this book is written in a kind of code. You probably could enjoy it without any background in Soviet history – but you wouldn’t really get it. You wouldn’t really get how important and just how subversive this book really is. The Afterword, and all of the notes in the back of the text – were my guide. They were HUGELY helpful.) But here is a bit from the Afterword, about Bulgakov in terms of a literary continuum – not just in Russia – but in the trend at that time:

Like the writers literary history has come to label modernists, Bulgakov is writing in the post-Einsteinean universe, and in many ways he fits the general profile of Anglo-American modernism. Because he is usually discussed as a Soviet writer, albeit an aberrant one, he is rarely placed in this context. Like the modernists, Bulgakov was inclined to parody the forms of the earlier masters, and in this novel he certainly uses myth to impose order of sort – only then to explode the myth itself. Like T.S. Eliot, Bulgakov had no desire to subvert traditional humanism – to the contrary, he longed to reestablish it in a country where it was held in contempt. But his art actually reveals the typical concerns of modernism, so it is not surprising that irony and ambiguity of motivation are central to The Master and Margarita. To some degree these approaches are present in earlier Russian writers, especially Dostoevsky and Gogol, but Bulgakov adds truly modern anxiety: the knowledge that there is no stable society against which to rebel, there is only entropy, visible everywhere.

And there is also a meta kind of thing going on here. Throughout the entire book, we get to read the chapters of the Master’s book on Pontius Pilate. These are extraordinary pieces of ventriloquism here – truly amazing – and at first it seems like they come out of nowhere (the 2nd chapter launches us, suddenly, into Pontius Pilate’s inner monologue) – and it feels like the story itself is being left behind, the story started in Chapter 1 – but once you keep reading, and you keep reading the Pontius Pilate stories interspersed with the main narrative – you realize how intertwined the stories are, how they mirror one another. It also becomes proof of the startling statement (startling in terms of the year this book was written): “Manuscripts don’t burn.” So Master may have tried to burn his book. And yet here we are reading it.

The book is a fantasy. People fly out of windows. There is a massive ball, headed by Satan, with a guest-list of famous murderers and poisoners throughout history. Cars fly.

I found a good reader-review on Amazon which I’ll quote here in full – it says it quite well:

Bulgakov was one of the first generation of Soviet writers who flourished in the 20s, during the short lived Soviet Experimental movement, and then suffered horribly after the stregnthening of Stalin’s regime. Bugakov was primarily a man of the Theater, and something of a theatrical quality hangs on to this book. The chapters have an almost tableaux style construction. When the Stalinist purges began, Bulgakov was began work on Master and Margarita, pretty much to please himself. He knew that he would never live to see it published.

The novel itself is nearly impossible to describe. It consists of three separate plots. On the surface is the visit to Moscow, of the Devil in the guise of a professor named Woland, and his henchmen, two grotesque disfigured men, a naked woman and a cat who plays chess among other things. The group proceeds to essentially terrorize the city’s intellectual community, mostly by exposing each character’s inner hypocracy. The satire of communist society in this section is quite biting, and uproariously funny. Embedded in this story is a “novel within a novel” …the story of Pontius Pilate and his encounter with the itinerant spiritual man, Yeshua. Finally, there is the story of the separated lovers, the Master and Margarita, who interweave between the other two stories. They live in the present day Moscow, but the Master ostensibly wrote the manuscript which told the story of Pontius Pilate.

This rich and complicated stew of a book works on so many different levels. At it’s most obvious, it is a scathing attack on communism and the cultural elite’s complicity with the evils of the system. It is also rather pitiless in it’s exposure of the greed, corruption and mendacity of human nature. But Bulgakov is not a conventional moralist. The Devil as Woland is an evil figure…sometimes a terrifying figure, and yet he ends up as the instrument of the redemption of both the Master and Margarita. There is a deep spiritual viewpoint at work here…Early in the novel, Yeshua tells Pilate that, “all men are good”, to Pilate’s incredulity. In the context of the novel, Yeshua seems hopelessly naive, but by the end of the novel, you wonder if this may actually not be the author’s central point. Even the devil is capable of some good here.

This book contains a whole world. Characters change in dizzying fasion and events go by with lightening speed. And yet, by the last pages there is a haunting beauty, an almost incandescent light that shines over the prose. Some of these final images stay etched in my brain even now, several weeks after finishing.

I highly recommend that anyone read this book. It may be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It certainly is the greatest Russian novel of the last 100 years!

Speaking of the devil (and it is true that he is not the conventional evil stereotype – he’s a mischief-maker, kind of like a Poltergeist for the entire nation):

You can’t even count how many times the word “devil” is used. “The devil knows why!” “The devil knows where he is going.” And yet the word “Christ” is only used once. It is startlingly obvious. In the Pontius Pilate chapters – we do meet the prisoner who is going to be crucified that day – but he seems more like a baffled and kindly regular man (albeit with strange powers of perception – he intuits that Pontius Pilate suffers from migraines – and that he loves his dog – a dog that is not even present during the interrogation.) But Bulgakov never calls him “Christ”. He is referred to as “Ha-Notsri”, or “the prisoner” or “Yeshua”. Pilate senses something about this prisoner. Not that he is a prophet. Not that he is the son of God. But … that there is something wrong about executing him … something dreadfully wrong. His migraine is described so vividly that I almost felt it banging in my own temples as I read it. Pontius interviews Ha-Notsri, and battles with the piercing sunlight, battles with these random thoughts of immortality that come from out of nowhere, seemingly … his own thoughts confuse him. Pilate thinks he is going mad. He just has a feeling that he should not execute this man. He is tormented.

But then we come back to Moscow. And we follow around a cast of characters – who all have encounters with this odd gentleman who appears from literally out of nowhere in Moscow, during one day in an unspecified year. The footnotes are indispensable because you are clued into certain things that explain some of the satire. Certain buildings, what the puns would be in Russian, what the fire really means, what Bulgakov was getting at here or there. It reminded me a bit of reading Ulysses. The book has a very Joycean feel to me. First of all, it just emanates personal exorcism. It really does. I don’t know who Bulgakov was – but I do know that he put his heart and soul into this book. It’s just THAT kind of prose. Powerful. Personal. And fearless. It also has a meandering feel of reality – in the same way that Joyce said that if Dublin ever burned to the ground, he would like to believe that it could be built back up again, by using the road-maps in his books. Bulgakov creates Moscow to that degree of specificity. And apparently – just like on Bloomsday when people wander around Dublin, following the path of Leopold Bloom … an entire Bulgakov tour-of-Moscow industry now exists. Bulgakov was not a literalist (obviously) – he could not afford to be – and much of Moscow he did not describe literally. He was more interested in the REAL truth of a landscape, which often does not sync up with what is really there. Literal truth did not interest him. People who are only interested in literal truth are despots in training. Either political despots, or social despots. I’ve had a couple of those who read this blog (although they usually don’t last long) – and I’m sure you all can think of people like that in your own life. They’re the ones who never get the joke, they’re the ones who can’t not nitpick, who can’t go with the flow, they’re the ones who think “playing devil’s advocate” is the HEIGHT of intelligence… We all know people like this. Now, nothing against facts. Please, don’t misunderstand. Facts are all well and good – but I have always maintained (because I live it) that there is another kind of truth. A deeper kind of truth that has nothing to do with being literal. Is the Moscow that Bulgakov describes LITERALLY Moscow? No. Even though some of the building numbers are the same – and any Russian who lived at that time would immediatley recognize most of this – it is Bulgakov’s Moscow. It is the Moscow of a fantastical moment in time – when the devil suddenly shows up. We are not in reality. We are not in an A equals B world, and we rarely are when we’re talking about great art. Is it effective as art? If it is – then I believe that it is BETTER than what is literally true.

Another quote from the afterword of my copy of the book:

In an early draft of The Master and Margarita Bulgakov planned to have a major scholarly character write a work about the “secularization of ethics”. This was an essential concern of Bulgakov’s generation, including those who were committed Marxists. Bulgakov’s much-loved stepfather was an atheist, who demonstrated that such beliefs were not incompatible with the highest ethics. To Bulgakov’s mind, however, the Soviet era seemed to abound in disturbing examples of what happens when ethics are divorced from the religious impulse and attached to the vagaries of political expediency. Pilate, as he struggles with his conscience and his fear, solidly based in what he knows awaits him if he allows a man who talked against the emperor to go free, in this way seemed quite contemporary. Bulgakov’s entire novel is in a sense a polemic with the dominant force of his time, the belief in enlightened rationalism which in his country ended in a totalitarian structure.

What happens when an enlightened rationalist comes face to face with the devil?

This is Bulgakov’s story.

It also helps to have some background in the Bible – and also it really helps to have some familiarity with Goethe’s Faust – since the parallels are everywhere. The footnotes, again, help lead you through the coded language. It’s incredible, an incredible read. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, other times truly terrifying, sometimes very very sad – the scenes in the mental hospital are very sad – because you realize that the only sane people in the entire book are locked up in the mental institution … and slowly but surely, they have the sanity knocked out of them. It’s like Catch 22. What does it mean to be sane in an utterly insane world? How can you even call yourself sane if you submit the INSANE rules of society? What is being sane? If everything is crazy?

Read the opening of the first chapter. Without ever saying what he is actually doing – Bulgakov creates such a sense of menace, and quiet, and trepidation. No, not just trepidation. Dread. Once you know what Bulgakov is criticizing, all you can see in these opening paragraphs, is an overpowering sense of dread.

One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds. One of them – fortyish, wearing a gray summer suit – was short, dark-haired, bald on top, paunchy, and held his proper fedora in his hand; black horn-rimmed glasses of supernatural proportions adorned his well-shaven face. The other one – a broad-shouldered, reddish-haired, shaggy young man with a checked cap cocked on the back of his head – was wearing a cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black sneakers.

The first man was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a literary magazine and chairman of the board of one of Moscow’s largest literary associations, known by its acronym, MASSOLIT, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov, who wrote under the pen name Bezdomny.

After readhing the shade of the newly budding linden trees, the writers made a beeline for the colorfully painted refreshment stand bearing the sign: BEER AND COLD DRINKS.

And here it is wroth noting the first strange thing about that terrible May evening. Absolutely no one was to be seen, not only by the refreshment stand, but all along the tree-lined path that ran parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At a time when no one, it seemed, had the strength to breathe, when the sun had left Moscow scorched to a crisp and was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere behind the Sadovoye Ring, no one came out to walk under the lindens, or to sit down on a bench, and the path was deserted.

“Give me some Narzan water,” said Berlioz.

“There isn’t any,” replied the woman at the refreshment stand, taking umbrage for some reason.

“Got any beer?” inquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice.

“The beer will be delivered later,” the woman answered.

“So what have you got?” asked Berlioz.

“Apricot juice, only it’s warm,” said the woman.

“Wel, give us that then!…”

The apricot juice generated an abundance of yellow foam, and the air started smelling like a barbershop. The writers drank it down and immediately began iccuping, paid their money, and went over and sat down on a bench facing the pond, with their backs to Bronnaya Street.

Here the second strange thing happened, which affected Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart pounded and stopped beating for a second, then started up again, but with a blunt needle lodged inside it. Besides that, Berlioz was seized with a groundless fear so intense that he wanted to run away from Patriarch’s Pond that very minute without looking back.

Berlioz looked around miserably, not knowing what had frightened him. He turned pale, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and thought, “What’s wrong with me? This has never happened before … my heart’s playing tricks on me … I’m overtired. Maybe it’s time to throw everything to the devil and go off to Kislovdsk …”

And then the hot air congealed in front of him, and out of it materialized a transparent man of most bizarre appearance. A small head with a jockey cap, a skimpy little checked jacket that was made out of air … The man was seven feet tall, but very narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin, and his face, please note, had a jarring look about it.

Berlioz’s life was so arranged that he was unaccustomed to unusual happenings. He turned even paler, opened his eyes wide, and in a state of confusion thought, “This can’t be! …”

But, alas, it was, and the tall transparent man swayed from left to right in front of him, without touching the ground.

At this point Berlioz was so overcome with terror that he shut his eyes. And when he opened them, he saw that it was all over, the mirage had evaporated, the man in checks had vanished, and the blunt needle had dislodged itself from his heart.

“What the devil!” exclaimed the editor. “You know, Ivan, I think I almost had a sunstroke just then! Maybe even something like a hallucination.” He tried to smile, but alarm still flickered in his eyes and his hands were shaking. Gradually, however, he calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief, managed a fairly cheerful “Well then …” and returned to the conversation that had been interrupted by the apricot juice.

The devil has appeared in Moscow.

Read the book and see what happens next.

It takes my breath away on multiple levels.

The courage of the pen. The brilliance of the satire. The ruthlessness of Bulgakov’s eye. The humor that he still was able to see in this insanity. And the hopelessness of the author himself, knowing this would never see the light of day during his lifetime …

The Master and Margarita was not published until 1966 – almost 30 years after Bulgakov’s death – and then, in highly censored form. It was still too hot to touch. And I would say, in many ways, it still is. It is a rebuke to authoritarian attitudes everywhere, anytime, wherever they crop up.

The book is now considered the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, and it sure isn’t hard to see why.

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18 Responses to From the Stacks Book Challenge: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

  1. steve on the mountian says:

    Damn. I have to live until I’m 200 to read everything that should be read.

  2. Erin says:

    Yeah, it’s going to take me till Saturday just to read this post! Seriously, Sheila, I do not know how you do this.

  3. mitch says:

    I have to live until I’m 200 to read everything that should be read.

    Well, if you got through the post, you are well on your way toward reading M&M.

    OK, seriously – I’ve wanted to write about M’n M for years; writing about something this good is, itself, kind of intimidating.

    Well, for me, anyway. Great post.

  4. red says:

    Mitch – I tried not to give TOO much away!!

    It is definitely intimidating to write about a book like that. Ack!!

    Have you read Children of the Arbat, mitch??

  5. Jille says:

    What a fabulous review. Somehow I never got around to reading it, now I must

  6. mitch says:

    Have you read Children of the Arbat, mitch??

    It’s been high on my must-read list since you wrote about it least year. But not quite yet.

    This winter.

  7. red says:

    Knowing you and your interest in all that stuff – you will TEAR thru it.

    It’s unbeLIEVable.

    Who knows what went on in Stalin’s head, what drove him (insecurity?) – but I think Children of the Arbat comes pretty close to giving a damn accurate guess. It just FEELS right.

    The things that made Stalin so extraordinary as a leader:

    1. He was patient – never ever EVER forgot a slight – it might be 30 years before he could take his revenge, but he ALWAYS got his revenge. Other despots are impatient – they want to get their way NOW … and so very often they burn up in their own self-destructive tendencies. But Stalin had the ability to wait. Chilling.

    2. And a PhD level understanding of the psychology of power.

    He was always the smartest guy in the room – even if he just sat back and said nothing. He was 20 steps ahead of everyone. Underestimate him at your peril.

    Anyhoo – Children of the Arbat just goes directly into his thought process … I just ate that shit up!!!

  8. John says:

    Glad you liked it.

    “You can’t even count how many times the word “devil” is used.”

    In Russian, “the devil take it” (chyort vozmi)means “damn it”. Bulgakov often played on that as a pun in the novel. Russians seem to feel closer to an anthropomorphic devil than we do because of their system of curse words.

  9. red says:

    John –

    I’m tellin’ ya – the footnotes in the back were so helpful. It was like having you right there. HA!

    Like – in that first paragraph I posted – where the 2 guys are described – I guess the word “black” in Russian sounds like devil – is that right? It’s a word that is somehow associated aurally with evil – so both of those characters have black “accessories” – glasses, or sneakers.

    I just would never have gotten the layers there – and I’m sure there are many more – and a lot is lost in translation.

    One of my favorite sections, john, is the part where the entire office building has put under hypnosis and they can’t stop singing songs in unison? He describes the looks of panic on their faces – how they desperately try to stop singing, etc. – but just cannot.

    An amazing metaphor for what it must have been like to live in Russia at that time. Also, the beauty of that metaphpor is that it is so FUNNY – that section made me laugh out loud.

  10. John says:

    Well, that scene was truer to life than it sounds: at that time, the Soviets really were composing workers’j songs that people had to sing at break time, and little management toadies would encourage after-hours glee clubs.

    The Soviets didn’t have that when I was there, of course, but watching employees of a department store in Japan sing the company song right before opening sure brings that scene to my mind. In many ways, Japan is Communist.

    One of the first places I went in Moscow in 1989 was the Patriarch’s Ponds, of course. I had almost the exact same conversation with a surly kiosk girl, excepting I asked for apricot soda first, and got warm Pepsi instead. The trolley tracks have been paved over, though.

    And yes, chyornyi (black) and Chyort (devil) have the same root word in Russian. It’s like an author laying the words “devious” and “devil” close together in an English narrative.

  11. red says:

    John –

    yes, I can’t remember the song they had to sing – but it was definitely some kind of “yay we’re all comrades” songs.

    Can you imagine? HAVING to sing a song on your coffee break? It’s hard to imagine … that’s one of the reasons why I loved this book: Bulgakov, while living that absurdity, was able to perceive the absurdity – even though his life was pretty much ruined by it.

    I love that you went to Patriarch’s Pond and asked for apricot soda! That’s great.

  12. mitch says:

    Knowing you and your interest in all that stuff – you will TEAR thru it.

    Found a used copy at B’n N for dirt cheap. Let the tearing begin!

  13. Mr. Bingley says:

    I’m so glad you finally dug into it, sheila. I knew you would adore this book. and what a great post; i’ll take it with me and reread it over thanksgiving!

  14. red says:

    mitch – Oh God, I’m so excited. Please PLEASE let me know your thoughts as you read it – I want to hear everything!

  15. red says:

    The cat Behemoth – even though he freaks me out – just cracks me up.

    Like – sitting there holding an andiron – or a chess piece – and speaking … as though it is perfectly normal … but he’s a CAT!

    I despised him.

    But he was comedic.

  16. John says:

    Behemoth was my favorite character after Margarita.

    When he’s swinging from the chandelier firing his Browning High Power at the NKVD stooges with their pansy-assed Tokarev’s, drinking kerosine to heal himself, I always hear the “drinking gasoline” line from Guns and Roses’s “Night Train”. I think that G&R should be the soundtrack for Behemoth if it ever gets made into a Hollywood movie (and no, I have not seen the Russina one yet).

    The Master never really got my sympathies as much as I think that Bulgakov intended. He always seemed to me to be less of a character than the soul of the Russian nation, personified.

  17. mitch says:

    I’m on about P140 of Arbat right now. Perhaps it’s because you’ve foreshadowed a bit – but I have the most intense sense of foreboding…

    GREAT book. Thanks for the tip!

  18. red says:

    Oh Mitch – so excited you started it. You are so gonna just “get it”. Yup – the whole thing is one long crescendo of foreboding. Terrifying – but wonderful characters. They totally live on in my memory. Sasha, all the others.

    And the characterization of Stalin and his thought process, and his bum arm, and his short legs, etc., is haunting!

    Look forward to hearing your continuing thoughts on it.

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