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Master and margarita text2/9/2024 ![]() Some of the disciples are Margarita, the Master's lover Matthew Levi, the only one of Jesus' followers to take an active role in the book although he's something of an amalgam of both the apostle and the evangelist Banga, Pilate's faithful dog, the only creature who truly loves him and Woland's small entourage: Korovyev (also known as 'Fagot'), Behemoth, Azazello, Abadona and the witch, Hella, who all serve as his proxies, an apparently typical Russian Orthodox representation of the devil. The devil who decides to visit Moscow in the 1930s in the guise of a professor called Woland, a character clearly reminiscent of Goethe's Mephistopheles and, to a lesser extent, perhaps Milton's Satan. ![]() ![]() A more accurate, if unwieldy, title might have been The Master, the Master, the Master, the Master and Margarita because there are four main masters in this book, all with their own disciples. The Master and Margarita was not, however, its original title one of its working titles was Satan in Moscow but even that is not an especially helpful title although it does set the scene. There are many levels to this book and numerous interpretations. It's the kind of book you'd expect a writer to produce after working on it for eleven years. To that end at the end of this post there will be links to numerous lengthy articles (I've been reading them for the past two days solid) which underscore much of what I'm about to say. Oh, I can hurl superlatives at it but I won't have space to back them all up. But even that doesn't really cover it so there's no way in this review I can do this book justice. The Master and Margarita can be reasonably called the greatest novel to come out of Communist Russia, a work of magical realism, a pre-apocalyptic novel, a love story, a biting political satire or simply a damn good read if you can get over the fact that most of the names are thirty-odd characters long. This is a very long review so for those of you reading this in your lunch hour let me cut to the chase. But more complete versions soon started circulating in samizdat editions - and in the west Michael Glenny’s spritely translation hit the shelves by 1967.When God created light, the first shadow was born – tagline to the film Shadow Builder It wasn’t until 1966 that his widow released a version of The Master and Margarita - and even then it was heavily censored. Indeed he was making plans to get it published as soon as he could a terrifying prospect to his friends and family, given the book’s vigorous lampooning of the Soviet Union. By this time he had almost finished his masterpiece. It was an inherited kidney disease that took Bulgakov when he was only 49, in 1940. Miraculously, Uncle Joe seems to have liked the irreverent author and spared him. This was a reasonable assumption, for a well-known public figure who refused to toe the party line and had even privately admitted: “My sympathies were entirely on the side of the Whites, whose retreat filled me with horror and incomprehension.” But he burned his first draft in 1930, thinking he had no future as a writer living in Stalinist Russia. Mikhail Bulgakov started writing The Master and Margarita around 1928 and it quickly became his chief obsession.
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