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.

The Master and Margarita

We spent last weekend staying in the fabulous Hunt Cottage in Tinui (near Castlepoint), which doesn’t have that much to do with writing or books except that, while there, I wrote a little and read a book.

The book I was reading (and still am reading) is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov, which several people have told me is their favourite book in the world, so I figured it was worth a look.

Despite being written during the Stalinist period, or perhaps because of that, it contains the typically Russian black sense of humour and absurdness, which I always enjoy. Russian writers seem to always be able to make even a tragedy funny - in a dark sort of way. A friend of mine suggested that the sense of the absurd may have come from Russia being such a large country, making bureaucratic absurdities inevitable.

I’m still in the middle of it, but I’m enjoying The Master and Margarita immensely. Possibly my favourite passage so far is this:

Ivan was so struck by the cat's behaviour that he froze motionless by the grocery store on the corner, and here he was struck for a second time, but much more strongly, by the conductress's behaviour. As soon as she saw the cat getting into the tram-car, she shouted with a malice that even made her shake:

'No cats allowed! Nobody with cats allowed! Scat! Get off, or I'll call the police!'

Neither the conductress nor the passengers were struck by the essence of the matter: not just that a cat was boarding a tram-car, which would have been good enough, but that he was going to pay!

The cat turned out to be not only a solvent but also a disciplined animal. At the very first shout from the conductress, he halted his advance, got off the footboard, and sat down at the stop, rubbing his whiskers with the ten-kopeck piece. But as soon as the conductress yanked the cord and the tram-car started moving off, the cat acted like anyone who has been expelled from a tram-car but still needs a ride. Letting all three cars go by, the cat jumped on to the rear coupling-pin of the last one, wrapped its paws around some hose sticking out of the side, and rode off, thus saving himself ten kopecks.

I read that passage out to Sean and kept him updated as I went along: ‘The cat hasn’t reappeared yet.’ ... A few pages later – ‘Oh, here’s the cat again. He’s drinking a glass of vodka.’