Thoughts on “The Master and Margarita”

The thing about Bulgakov was that he worked on this novel for so long, probably knowing that the chances of it ever being read or published in the Soviet population at large were despairingly slim. And still he wrote it.

There are many references in the novel to other Russian writers, including a brilliant joke about what makes one qualify as a writer. I won’t wax about the symbolism and the huge Judo-Christianity themes in The Master and Margarita.

For my course, the relevant areas lie in the satirical aspects of this novel. Soviet bureaucracy in the 1930s was not yet at its height but it was already stifling. It would have been difficult to make a living and having to choose between writing for a living or writing and being ostracized (or worse) for it. In the novel, the protagonist, known simply as “the Master” meets the same problem as Bulgakov, except that he is altogether saved from it all by the Devil himself. At the end, the Master rides off towards the moon and the stars or whatever it is, on a chariot with Satan’s retinue and with his lover, the beautiful Margarita at his side. How cool is that? Bulgakov’s fate could not be more different – and is a cold reminder about the conditions of being a writer. It is a precarious title to hold. He died in 1940 of kidney failure, having still not completed the revisions of “The Master and Margarita”, unable to emigrate from the Soviet Union and only really remembered at the time for one play he wrote in 1924.

Depressing, no?