First impressions review: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
I quite like Latin American magical realism novels. So when I heard that this genre not only had a tradition in other regions, but that there was a Soviet magical realism story involving the devil and his cigar-smoking cat running amok in Stalin's Russia, I knew I had to check it out.
Premise:
The book starts out with an editor of an anti-religious literary magazine critiquing an author's most recent poem, which is critical of Jesus. The editor points out that this isn't the point - the point is that Christ never existed. To which a strange foreigner pipes up to say that this is complete nonsense, and he should know: he was there. By the time we get a flashback of Pilate meeting a pleasantly eccentric but probably-non-divine Yeshua, and see Satan (AKA Woland) and his cohorts starting to cause apparently random havoc among Moscow's modern-day artistic and literary scene, I started hearing 'Sympathy for the devil' playing in my head1 - and it stayed there for the entirety of the book.
What I liked:
The best characters are the hellish contingent. Woland is accompanied by a huge talking tomcat named Behemoth, a fellow in cracked glasses who mostly but not exclusively goes by Koroviev, a snaggle-toothed redheaded thug called Azazello, and the clothing-averse zombie witch Hella. Pilate is kind of an interesting character as well, representing political cowardice; he knows Yeshua isn't about to start an uprising, and quite likes the man, but goes along with the execution anyway because if word got back to Caesar that he let a rebel go then HE might be in trouble2. The titular characters are a writer who goes mad after writing a novel about Pilate that gets heavily criticized even though it never gets published, and his mistress, who makes a deal with the devil - briefly becoming a witch, flying broomstick and all, and presiding over a ball for the damned - to save him3. Unlike everyone else who encounters the devil and his cohorts, Margarita seems to remain perfectly sane. Possibly this is due to being A) motivated by love and B) smart enough to figure out immediately who she is dealing with.
Certainly anyone who tries to deal with them for money or, worse, insults them or tries to call the police, meets with extravagant weirdness and bad fortune. Ladies who exchanged their clothes during the 'black magic seance' at a Moscow theater find themselves in their underwear when the fancy new duds evaporate, the presenter who keeps insisting they reveal how the tricks are done gets his head actually removed and then reattached4, a man who accepts a bribe for letting them stay in an apartment gets reported to the police and finds that the rubles have turned into dollars, and so on.
Indeed, the devil and his cohorts seem closer to chaotic tricksters playing off the existing foibles of humanity than the true font of evil. And it may be this, more than the supernatural elements, that were behind the fact that this book was finished in 1940 but not published until1965. The Moscow police are powerless to deal with this gang rampaging around town revealing the unfairness of 'currency stores'5 and pointing out the silliness of the constant calls to show one's identification papers with exchanges like this:
'My sweetie...' Koroviev began tenderly.
'I'm no sweetie,' interrupted the citizeness.
'...Well, so, if you don't want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don't have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoyevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of his novels and you'll be convinced...And I don't think he even had any identification card! What do you think?' Koroviev turned to Behemoth.
'I'll bet he didn't,' replied Behemoth...
'You're not Dostoyevsky...Dostoyevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoyevsky is immortal!'
As that exchange illustrates, this novel has the slightly dark humor common in Russian literature. There are also a lot of vivid descriptions. For instance:
Then Margarita found herself in a room with a pool of monstrous size bordered by a colonnade. A giant black Neptune spouted a wide pink stream from his maw. A stupefying smell of champagne rose from the pool...Ladies...with a cry dived swallow-like into the pool. Foamy columns shot up. The crystal bottom of the pool shone with light from below that broke through the density of the wine, and in it the silvery swimming bodies could be seen...Loud laughter resounded under the columns, booming like the jazz band6.
Things l didn't like as much:
I was a bit lost at the beginning trying to keep track of all the characters - the human ones all have at least 3 names, as is usual in Russian novels - and the backwards-and-forwards time jumps. We don't meet the titular characters until a third of the way through the book, so it isn't initially clear where the story is going. There is a somewhat frantic quality to the writing, both in the words themselves and the actions of the characters, almost all of whom are apt to start shouting or sobbing incoherently at the drop of a hat. But once I got into the rhythm of it and figured out that most of the human characters weren't that important I quite enjoyed the writing style.
The other things that pulled me out of the story a bit were elements that are 'a product of their time'. For instance, at the devil's ball all the gentlemen are in tailcoats while all the ladies are naked. Not for orgies or anything, they just are. Similarly, it is only slightly jarring at the devil's ball to encounter silent black servants/slaves; It is the 1930s, and that sort of slavery has been abolished for ages, but he's the devil, after all. But then Pilate's similarly wordless and subservient slave is also African and I'm thinking: OK, that's not impossible in the Roman Empire, but certainly not the default7. The Soviet Union was officially pro racial and gender equality, and it would be very reasonable if this book tried to illustrate how that wasn't totally being lived up to, as it does when showing people still being greedy or status-hungry. But that's not what's happening here; these things seem to be stuck in as unquestioned aesthetic choices. Also, having the self-insert author character only ever be called 'the master'? I'm not even going to argue that Bulgakov's writing isn't masterful but...really?
Recommendation:
If you like Russian humor, magical realism, or vivid and dynamic writing, definitely check this one out. There's a lot to unpack about what it has to say about the good and bad of Soviet society, and the importance of art, and what good and evil mean, and much more. Overall, the pluses far outweigh the minuses.
1. The lyrics are so ridiculously perfect that if this were ever made into a movie it would be a crime if that were not the end-credits song and possibly woven into the soundtrack elsewhere.
2. Hmm, what could THAT be an allegory for, I wonder?
3. This plotline is fairly autobiographical: Bulgakov had trouble getting published and once burnt this manuscript before it was done, and he had a mistress who he later married and entrusted the finished version of 'The Master and Margarita' to on his deathbed in 1940.
4. Which, even if this were a normal magic show, would ruin the effect in the interest of not accidentally making people believe in the supernatural. So he is an annoying character, and not one the reader is going to feel too sorry for!
5. Where one can get much better goods if you have foreign currency. This was/is a thing in Cuba, too.
6. Eat your heart out, Jay Gatsby!
7. Most Roman slaves were from the Mediterranean region or the northern Germanic tribes.
