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it – 2009 Let’s Read Together 1

Let’s Read Together

"The Master and Margarita"

A Combined Glance
Livorno, 2009

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In the complicated narrative plot and in the many-sided shapes that compose the
romance (realism, symbolism, surrealism, grotesque comicality), the unifying factor
is the contrast between evil and good.

The first one is identifiable in the lust, in the desire for power, in the red tape, in
atheism, in selfishness, in hypocrisy, in the lust that enlivens the negative
characters, mediocre humanity quite integrated in the system.

The second one, that not by chance mixes together the cast out and the losers, is
love, in all its shapes: love for every living being (Jeshua), love for truth, love of
couple.

Wherever rationality that gives false security prevails there is evil. Not at random in
the course of the story we find a lot of falling or suffering heads: from the initial
beheading of Berlioz to Pilato's headache, from the cut head of the magic show's
presenter to the mental confusion of all of the characters that end up in a mental
hospital. The head is the icon of evil. Love is Jeshua, is the swallow that may for a
second raise Pilato from the obsession of his role and open before him liberating
solutions, is Margarita's power. Bulgakov opposes heart-characters to head-
characters, while the contemporary Freud was discovering the same split in the
individual depth.

This opposition does not seem possible in the reality of this earth, but only in the
free world of fantasy. What other possibility for an unappreciated artist, whose
historical horizon saw rise and triumph regimes (one of which he was a direct victim
of) united by the organized rational cruelty, child of human presumption? He is
lucky to have missed seeing the incredible results of scientific rationality...

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The event, very special, makes the book to be fascinating. Using different fiction
modes, the author offers a view of the Russian society during the regime
highlighting the abuses and the favoritisms by the way of allegory.

What stuck me most was:

1) The dreamlike aspect that charms and carries the reader into a
special world making him forget both the personal reality and that that
of the story.

2) The meeting with the unforeseen (Satan) that changes life totally
and is always around the corner.

3) The character of Pilato, man, not only despot, deeply tormented by

doubts and feelings of guilt.

4) The meeting of the Master with Margarita and the concept of love
that hits and leaves defenseless.

Regarding this, I found especially effective this passage: ....

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"Love hit us instantly. I knew It that same day, already an hour later, when we met
again, oblivious of the town, on the embankment. ..the May sun was shining for us.
...”

5) The accuracy in the description of the details and the attention

towards the details that make the environments concrete and the
characters living. (EX. Pilato's hatred for the perfume of the oil of roses,
his terrible headache..)

There are different possible levels of reading: partly black comedy (for example
many scenes with the cat Begemot), partly deep mystical allegory, partly biting
socio-political satire not only of the Sovietic Russia but also of the superficiality and
vanity of the modern life in general. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a
particular nostalgia of the "old times" - in fact, the only one in the story to mention
the Tsarist Russia is the same Satan/Woland.

Images from:
http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-master-and-margarita.html

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Moreover, especially fierce is the satire towards the literary elite of the period,
immortalized in the members of the Massolit as a group of mediocre poets,
wretched critics, false pompous intellectuals, hypocrites, pleasure seekers and
sycophants (persons that denounce for revenge to the authority a debatable fact).
From a religious point of view, notwithstanding the explicit references of the story to
Christianity, a version anything but orthodox is supported. For example,
Bulgakov's good-natured Jesus/Yeshua of Bulgakov complains that Levi Matteo's
writings about him are inaccurate. As for Satan/Woland, he does not seem
presented as in open opposition to God, but he is rather described as a pleasure-
loving and mocking being devoted to punishing corruption and misery and making
fun of them.

A famous quote from "The Master and Margarita" is: "the manuscripts do not burn".
The Master is a writer persecuted by the censorship of the oppressive Stalinist
regime in the Moscow of the thirties, and he burns the manuscript of his book to
free himself from the problems it has created for him. There it is an
autobiographical element in this aspect of the character of the Master, since
Bulgakov himself had burnt a previous draft of "The Master and Margarita" for
similar reasons.

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I greatly enjoyed reading the Master and Margarita, especially when we are told all
the devilries of Woland and of his assistants, incredible the lightness with which the
misdeeds are described without omitting the facets of the human behavior
especially when by magic money is poured on the people who are watching "black
Magic" show by Woland and his followers, money, money that intoxicates and
makes people loose their heads when it arrives unexpected to those who have
never had enough of it and the greed that it incites, (an other subject that unites
people of all times), in spite of the Russian regime in the time of the story, that does
not certainly encourage the individual economic enrichment .

To close I would like to say how true it is that in the reading of the "classics" in
whatever period they were written, one finds present the feelings, passions,
apprehensions, that have been part of the human beings for ever and ever.

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The reading of this romance has not been simple, but binding and at times tiring.

It created in me the interest and the desire to deepen some topics (various appear
during the reading, fantastic, historic, satirical, political, magical and grotesque) and
for this I have been helped by: the meetings with the members of the reading club
and the work on wiki.

So I have come to know the author, his life and its vicissitudes.

I was able to deepen the historical period, Russia, Stalin, censorship, social
differences.

I have discovered that artists, producers, playwrights at world level have received
inspiration from this work.

I have therefore read a novel regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of the
Russian literature of 20° century, defined by Eugenio Montale "A miracle that
everyone should greet with emotion".

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Personally I find "The Master and Margarita" to be an extraordinary and

overwhelming work, visionary without being irrational; this story represents fully the
heavy standard of living and, even more, artistic of the writers of the Stalin times.
To be able to survive and to escape the fear of the repressions, Bulgakov has
made a joke of them, the same way as he has mocked the cultural and political
inertia hardly agreed upon by the dissidents. Brilliant, imaginative, realistic, ironical.
The literary world is full of masterpieces: each one attractive in its own way and
above all for its variety. But "The Master and Margarita" carries with itself an
important secret: the secret of humanity (revealed by the author with a lot of
courage and little reflection). The secret of forgiveness as an absolute well-being,
and of the existence of evil as a witness on behalf of good. Practically the essence
of the human nature, in the second case, and the essence of the divine nature in
the first one.

Livorno, May 2009.

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