This is a bit like trying to explain the "Harry Potter & the Forbidden Journey" ride at Universal Studios (a constant ad on Goodreads [also, cool factoid: this is actor Daniel Radcliffe's favorite novel!])--I will eventually make a fool of myself trying to describe the orchestrations of both the physical body with the pyrotechnics & rollercoaster mechanics... see, I just can't.And one can't quite get to the bottom of "The Master and Margarita"--a trippy, satirical, hard-to-classify classic of th...

The Chicago Tribune wrote: “The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative and poignant, and everywhere full of rich descriptive passages.”Hilarious and contemplative my ass, CT. This book is an interminable slog.Look, here’s the deal. I get that this book satirizes 1930s Stalinist Russia, and I get that—for some—this earns The Master and Margarita a place on their “works-of-historical-importance” shelves. But for me, it earns nothing. I mean, let’s just call a spade a spade, shall we...

‘All power is violence over people.’Pre-review (2021): I’ve just reread this and was once again completely enraptured by the power and beauty of this book. It is a comic masterpiece that gets better with each visit. This time I went with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. I would recommend it for first time readers as it is very fluid and feels quite modern, though having read many authors under their translation you can detect their style and there is a bit of a tendency to overtranslate (...

Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other… I experienced this magical novel as an unrivalled ode to love and reveled in its delectable burlesque and hilarious scenes. It knocked me off my feet and pointed...

Soviet Ghost StoriesStories, stories, all is stories: political stories, religious stories, scientific stories, even stories about stories. We live inside these stories. Like this one in The Master and Margarita. The story that we can more or less agree upon we call reality. But is it real?Story-making and telling is what we do as human beings. Through stories we create meaning out of thin air, in the same way that plants create their food from light, and usually with about the same level of cas...

There was something devilish and demonic in the time itself so the devil with his demons descended unto the capital city.First of all, the man described did not limp on any leg, and was neither short nor enormous, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. He was wearing an expensive grey suit and imported shoes of a matching colour. His grey beret was cocked rakishly over one ear; under his arm he carried a stick with a black knob shaped li...

This book by Bulgakov is a miracle - a magical text of incredible imagination that miraculously did not get its author shipped out to a gulag and forgotten. Miraculous that the book made it out of Stalinist Russia for our enjoyment. Miraculous as it is a work of sublime beauty and a fitting 20th C Faustian story. A must-read to understand a slice of reality under a totalitarian government. The writing is engaging and highly imaginative. I need to reread this one again!Just rereading tonight and

This is going to be a short one. I am too disappointed to be able to write much. I am not disappointed with the book but with myself for failing to love this one. I have no idea what went wrong. I love satire and the subject seemed to be something I would be interested to explore. I liked it, I got some of the hidden meaning but overall I was not enthralled. I tried both the audiobook narrated by one of my favourites, Julian Rhind-Tutt and the written Romanian version. None of the two versions l...

In a Moscow public garden, a writer and a poet discuss religion: Did Jesus exist? While the writer tries to impose his vision of things on the poet, a third character suddenly appears as a movement of the air. He joins in the conversation of the two men, says to be a professor of black magic visiting Moscow for a series of consultations and begins to tell a strange story about Pontius Pilate.This stranger is, in fact, the Devil. It predicts the writer's death and his stay in the psychiatric hosp...

«Sympathy for the Devil»His name is God. Not Lucifer,not Satan,but God!!!Satan is God in a bad mood. God in a bad mood lays our souls to waste. «As heads is tales Just call me LUCIFER cop is to criminal as God is to Lucifer». God in a good mood plays games with us. «What’s confusing you is just THE NATURE OF MY GAME»«This song has a direct tie to the book, "the Master and the Margarita", is about all the history & tragedies with points throughout time. The man he is describing is the devil.The

I'm staying home from work today, sick to the extreme, and it's only in that unique feverish clarity that comes with illness that I dare to even try to write about this book.This is THE book. The one that all the other books are measured against. The one that I've read more times since I was twelve than the number of books some people I know have read in their entire lives. The one from which I've memorized entire passages. This is it, the golden standard, the masterpiece, the unattainable perfe...

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail BulgakovIn this work, reality and fantasy, "Real" and "Surreal" are intertwined, it can be said that it is a kind of "Russian magical realism". The novel has philosophical and social themes, with a political background, which is subtly and indirectly reminiscent of the "Stalin" era, with a very delicate and artistic expression, and sometimes poetically, the problems of the society of the "Soviet" days. And at the philosophical level, reminds the reader of his bo...

Swimming Against the StreamThis was my second reading of “The Master and Margarita”, although the first must have been in the mid-70’s.I had vivid memories of the first reading, although if you had asked me to describe them, I wouldn’t have been able to. All I can recall is something fluid and magical.I hesitate to use the term “Magical Realism”, because I wasn’t aware of it at the time and, besides, I dispute whether the term applies to Bulgakov’s work.My experience this time was quite differen...

This is a romp. While reading it I saw somewhere that Salman Rushdie said it was a major influence for him in the writing of The Satanic Verses. I have an inkling, unconfirmed at this point, that Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino were also influenced by it. Several things about it surprise me. No doubt it's loaded with political subtext about Stalin's Russia; it was written during the years of the worst crimes of Stalin's regime. I speak here of "dekulakization," in which some 20 to 50 m...

This review is dedicated to Mary, the very model of a perfect co-moderator and GR friend.Unlocking the Meaning of The Master and MargaritaMikhail BulgakovIn the decades following the publication of The Master and Margarita, myriad critics have attempted to find a key to unlock the meaning of Bulgakov’s unfinished masterwork. Some viewed the novel as a political roman à clef, laboriously substituting historical figures from Stalinist Moscow for Bulgakov’s characters. Others posited a religious fo...

A poet "Homeless", as he calls himself, and a magazine editor, his gruff boss, Berlioz, are having a conversation, in a quiet, nondescript Moscow park, just before the start of the Second World War. Drinking, just harmless sodas, and discussing business, ordinary right? That's the last time in this novel, it is. An apparition appears in the sky, weird and unbelievable, a frightening seven foot transparent man, is seen floating above their heads, but only Berlioz spots it, he's obviously, the edi...

"The devil went down to Georgia Moscow, he was looking for a soul to steal." —Primus Phew! I needed a margarita after finishing The Master and Margarita! What a magnificent, turbulent read! This extravagant Russian allegory is an adult 'Alice in Wonderland' bursting at the seams with mischief, darkness and rambunctiousness. The ghosts of Faust and Dante must have sat on the author's shoulders as he worked tirelessly on this masterpiece.In short, this book was made for me! Come down from the

More or less a novel, this book is also an allegory. Like Moby Dick, there are probably a dozen interpretations that can be given to it. The extensive local color comes from Moscow in the early Twentieth Century. (The author wrote and revised it from 1929 to 1940). The main plot centers around a crowd of Russian literati - authors, theater goers and hangers-on, particularly one older world-weary author (the Master) and his beautiful young girlfriend (Margarita). The devil and his sidekicks come

The Master and Margarita by Soviet era writer Mikhail Bulgakov seems to inspire strong emotions though most critics and commentators have been impressed with the fantastic satire. Le Monde listed the novel number 94 on its 100 books of the century. I found it absurd, outrageous, inconsistent, but for the most part entertaining. I would probably appreciate the novel more if I better understood Bulgakov’s scathing satire on atheistic Soviet society, which he exposes as materialistic and bourgeois....

There once was a book praised as boffThat caused others to pan it and scoffSo who wrote this thingWhence sentiments swing?T’was a Russian they called Bulgakov. The culture was smothered by StalinHe purged those he felt failed to fall in.So how to respondSans magical wand?With satire, to show it’s appallin’.The book has been said to have layersWith multiple plotlines and players.There’s good and there’s badAnd witches unclad.Can naked truth sate the naysayers?The Devil’s own minions had power.Bli...