13 December 2007

The Master and Margarita II

I finished reading The Master and Margarita (this link is to a website all about the novel created by a very keen fan) last week, and I found it beautiful and rollicking and moving, though I’m still not entirely sure what it was all about.

A friend of mine wrote a dissertation on it and two other novels from the 1930s (The Master and Margarita was mostly written in the 1930s, though it wasn’t published until after Bulgakov’s death in the 1960s): The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (now there’s a depressing novel) and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. They seemed rather dissimilar novels to me, but she said that what they had in common was ‘the world gone mad’.

It may interest other Bulgakov fans to know that the sidekicks of Woland (Satan) - Behemoth, Koroviev and Azazello – turned up in an X-Men anthology that Sean was reading in the weekend. They’re only there for about three frames, and they don’t look anything like how I imagined them, but a curious cross-over nevertheless.

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