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OT "Master & Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov


myshkin

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Superb read. Someone lent it to me a year or so ago and I didn't quite connect with it and put it down half-way through. Bought it recently though and this time I loved it. Incredible to think of someone writing such a book in the Stalinist Russia of the time. Needless to say it didn't get past the censors of the day. Will certainly check out some more of Bulgakov though unsurprisingly he doesn't have much of an oeuvre. Must be pretty dispiriting to know anything you write will most likely remain unpublished. Not that Bulgakov was on the face of it a political writer. He was however, perhaps much more subversive-here the thoughts of a kind of heir to Bulgakov, Victor Pelevin.

"The effect of this book(Master & Margarita) was really fantastic. There's an expression "out of this world." This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there's a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn't live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn's books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn't liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn't even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn't liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things."

 

The above from a great interview

http://www.bombsite.com/pelevin/pelevin3.html

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It's a great book!

 

I first read in 70s, in USSR, under pillow. Only way to get this book was to borrow it from friend, sometimes as a typewriter copy on very bad paper. How it was written - it was the way to express unspeakable. You couldn't talk about Jesus, you couldn

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Thanks for the tip on the film of it, Temnov. I'll keep a look out. Interesting to hear also of your experience of this from the inside, so to speak. Shows too the power of art, often in ways very elusive to the somwhat dull of mind. I remember from Dostoesky the debate about which was of more worth, Pushkin or a pair of shoes. And also Lenin who said he had to give up listening to Beethoven as it made him want to love humanity whereas what was needed was the smashing of heads. Hmm....which do we need more of, love or head smashing? Pity he didn't stick to Beethoven.

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