I read a lot of Russian literature and am becoming a bit of an aficionado. This book was first recommended to me by an ex-girlfriend from Serbia and it’s taken me a while to actually get around to completing it but I finally have done so and can produce this review. Bulgakov is a twentieth century author of Russian fiction and lived during the heady epoch of Communism with its quite harsh censorship. Indeed this book was not published during the author’s lifetime and was found as a manuscript in the drawer next to his deathbed. It took quite a few decades before finally seeing the light. When you read the book you can quite clearly see why the censors would have prevented its publication in the Soviet Union. The official atheism of the Communist Party frowned upon any mention of religion as the Russian Orthodox Church was seen as potential enemy of the Bolsheviks and steps were taken to eradicate its influence at varying degrees throughout the post-Leninist revolutionary period.
The religiousness of the novel? Well, the devil comes to Moscow unleashes hell with some unexplained spiritual voodoo, totally disrupting society, focussed in particular upon the literary community and theatrical crowd of Moscow. We get a portrait of life in Moscow under the Communist regime, and the community of artists, writers and actors. There is an offshoot sub-tale, quite a strange aside, that of Pontius Pilate and his actions during the period of the crucifixion of Jesus. We flit between tales from the streets of Moscow where trams decapitate unfortunate members of the public and go back in time to the Roman procurator’s private worries about morality and containing Jewish rebellion in imperial Palestine.
The love story emerges between the Master and Margarita. And as the story progresses it descends into a rather disturbingly insane spiral of increasingly bizarre and fantastical events. Margarita flies off on a supercharged broomstick, the defender of feminist virtue and striking a balance between the obvious downside of a pact with the devil and gaining social justice and ending up with her lover, The Master, who, struggling in his effort to document the real tale of Pontius Pilate and evade the Russian censor, ends up relying on Satan himself to magically recover a manuscript he has himself shredded in a struggle for conscience.
Mental Hospitals are a place of gathering and meeting for victims of Behemoth and his random acts of wickedness. It’s either in the nuthouse or the Morgue where victims end up and later we see many victims from the recent past and indeed deeper history reliving their deaths and sins in a purgatorial hell’s party involving lots of vodka and splendour with Margarita glamorously hosting the event.
The demons are Koroviev, Woland, Behemoth and Azazello and are intertwined with many they seduce or whose lives they disrupt. There seems to be no real agenda other than to wreak havoc and chaos. Indeed, one thing a reader cannot do at all, is predict the plot of the unwinding tale. It’s quite wild journey but it is also sinister and to be honest to even speculate on demonic entities and dark forces like this can not be a healthy thing for anyone to do and should be avoided. Nevertheless, it is an original and unique story and when taken in context of the environment in which it was written, where Communists did rule and where culture and creative arts and indeed religion where revolutionised as with almost every element of soviet society the ‘Master and Margarita’ is a classic of twentieth century Russian literature.