Magical Realism in a Repressed Soviet Style: "Manuscripts Don't Burn"
Written: Nov 08 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It has its moments, some amusing, some tragic.
Cons: Bewildering, seemingly plotless. It's dreary in its absurdity.
The Bottom Line: There's something of value here. I'm not sure what it is, except that it's not what most people think it is.
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| panguitch's Full Review: Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita Books |
The editor of a Soviet-era magazine and a bombastic poet argue over whether such a person as Jesus ever existed. It's a scene you might expect of any two drunks on a Moscow park bench. And what happens next, and for that matter throughout the rest of the book, is rather like an alcohol-inspired vision. A stranger named Woland walks up and offers the "Seventh Proof" of the reality of Jesus. He tells a truly fascinating version of Christ's execution, from the perspective of Pilate, completely contradicting the gospels both in its details and its characterizations. For an encore he predicts the manner of the editor's death, which follows scant minutes later.
Ivan, the poet, is driven mad by the experience, and in the asylum he meets a man known only as the Master, a would-be novelist whose masterpiece has been stifled by the literary ruling class. It's a novel about Pontius Pilate, not coincidentally, and although the Master finally burned it in his despair, a charred page and its memory were kept by his lover, champion and savior, Margarita.
Meanwhile, Woland, who is none other than Satan himself, claims the newly vacated apartment of the recently beheaded editor and moves in with his bizarre entourage: Behemoth the anthropomorphized black cat, Koroviev the false interpreter, Hella the naked witch/maid, and the snaggletoothed and walleyed Azazello. They systematically drive the who's-who of the literary and theatre community insane and deliver a performance that leaves an MC headless and hundreds of Moscow socialites naked in the streets. From there things only get stranger.
The characterizations are bitingly delicious, though the multitude of literary and theatre types quickly becomes indistinguishable (the book sometimes feels like that usually annoying sub-genre of literature written for, or at, litterateurs). Woland and his crew are always intriguing and entertaining, but their inconsistent nature prevents attachment. The Master and especially Margarita are well-drawn, as is Ivan. The episodes of Christ's execution, as related by either Woland or the Master, present compelling and unorthodox depictions of Pontius Pilate, Matthew the Levite, and Jesus, with Pilate in particular becoming the best realized character in the novel.
Besides the Faustian motif and a superficially lighthearted take on the Kafkaesque repression of literary genius, the atmosphere of Moscow in the 1920s or 30s is much the star of the book. The social criticism or comedy is at its best in the minute vignettes of people evading authority, scurrying after foreign money, wrestling for apartments, and rationalizing away experiences that don't easily fit in the bureaucracy of the modern atheist's worldview. Autobiographical elements are clear not only in major characters and plot points, but in these small episodes that capture the Patriarch's Ponds neighborhood where Bulgakov lived.
It's all well done yet at the same time exceedingly tiresome. A light tone can only mask cynicism, not make it palatable in such large doses. On the other hand, some things must be ingested precisely because they are not palatable. There is a great temptation to reduce the book to mathematical equations. But while the secret decoder ring from the Cracker Jack box of 20th Century literary criticism may make the novel palatable, it also makes it much less personal, and The Master and Margarita is, first and foremost, a very personal expression.
Woland delivers the Master from the asylum by burning his file and proclaiming, "Remove the document and you remove the man." Bulgakov knew this truth first-hand. Like so many of Russia's 20th Century literary talent, the censorship of his work reduced him to a non-entity, while the resurrection of his corpus in the 1960s made him a celebrity. Over twenty-five years after his death he was admired the world over, the toast of every literary circle, and undoubtedly of the same sort of editor he always despised. He was only forty when he died. He should have lived to see it. Instead he died a nobody, left an Earth which for all intents and purposes never knew he existed. Perhaps he had a beautiful woman, willing to make deals with any kind of devil, who took him away on a moonlit road to paradise, a refuge as peaceful as the Master's, an absolution as longed for as Pilate's.
We, left with his work, are more like Ivan. Troubled by a strange dream, the memory of a story that eludes us.
– Panguitch
Nikolai Gogol was the grandfather of Russian social criticism with absurd, cynical, and fantastical elements.
• Dead Souls: http://www.epinions.com/content_82653187716
• "The Nose": http://www.epinions.com/content_82951966340
Vladimir Voinovich has more recently continued the tradition.
• The Fur Hat: http://www.epinions.com/content_87092137604
• The Ivankiad: http://www.epinions.com/content_83613159044
• Moscow 2042: http://www.epinions.com/content_86408138372
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
panguitch
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Location: Springville, UT
Reviews written: 285
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About Me:
"Realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience." -Ursula K. Le Guin
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