The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

In this novel, a huge black cat named Behemoth plays the familiar to Satan. The Devil has dropped by Moscow in the 1930s, an especially repressive time in the Stalin era when people just disappeared, taken away by the secret police after being denounced by enemies at work or in their apartment building. Satan, going by the alias of Professor Woland, finds it easy to stir up trouble and unrest among new Soviet Humanity. They are comrades who are prone to lying, fear, and cynicism in the pursuit of the important things in life such as promotions and dominating life in communal apartments.

Behemoth the demonic cat walks on his two hind legs, makes sarcastic wisecracks, and quaffs vodka. He plays chess. He likes burning things and tearing heads off. Reckless with a Browning, he is the antithesis of the responsible gun user. He is a shape-shifter, but often doesn’t bother because he enjoys scaring people with his true form. Huge for a cat though he is, he is still disrespected and smacked around by bigger beastly characters.

Like V., by Thomas Pynchon. The Master and Margarita is another modernist novel whose learned allusions to things philosophical, teleological, and historical may intimidate readers who are just looking for a good literary time. Be not daunted. Just enjoy the exuberant language such as:

At a time when no one, it seemed, had the strength to breathe, when the sun had left Moscow scorched to a crisp and was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere behind the Sadovoye Ring, no one came out to walk under the lindens, or to sit down on a bench, and the path was deserted.

Though scenes like that reminded me of Riga, where I lived for four years, I must confess that I was daunted at times. At first it was hard to get oriented to the two stories, particularly near the beginning. In the Jerusalem narrative, for example, Pontius Pilate meets Jesus for an interrogation that ends with Pilate’s uneasy conscience at the sentence of death he issues. In the Master's tale, the conformity of ordinary people in the Roman Empire is paralleled by cowardice and moral imbecility of desperate Soviet critics. They kid themselves that they have freely chosen to subordinate themselves to the dictates of thugs and philistines. They are “furious” living under the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, so they take out their self-disgust and anger on targets designated by the cultural authorities.

I read the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. Critics have praised this as an accurate and complete English translation. It has notes by Bulgakov's biographer, Ellendea Proffer.