More importantly, in the context of The Dissident, The Master and Margarita acquired practical and strategic value. It was clear to me that The Master and Margarita would figure prominently in my characters’ vodka-infused discussions that stretched into the night.īeing there, my characters would see that a decade earlier The Master and Margarita had dealt a deadly blow to state-mandated atheism and led to spiritual rebirth, both Christian and Jewish. This changed five years ago, when I began work on The Dissident, a novel set among the Moscow intelligentsia in 1976. I didn’t know how to begin to internalize the Pilate chapters-and felt no urgency to do so. If I tried to comprehend every book I love, I’d have no time to write. The love story, too, is okay, but not strong enough to stand alone once you start to undo the novel’s three-strand braid. Often, I skipped the Pilate chapters in re-readings. The Pilate chapters are okay, sort of, but the language feels stilted by comparison. The Moscow adventures of Satan and his merry pranksters have always carried the book for me. Even after multiple re-readings, every now and then I feel compelled to set down the book for a moment of silent appreciation of his surgeon’s precision, his humor, his contempt, his sadness, his fury. The rule of three seems to hold up nicely in The Master and Margarita.īeing an émigré and clinging to language might explain my persistent pursuit of The Master and Margarita. Scenes featuring nude Margarita, a vision built around forced requisitioning of gold, and a scene where a portly Soviet bureaucrat is turned into a flying pig that gets piloted by a naked girl similarly had to go. Passages that went away included Satan’s salty remarks about the New Soviet Man, references to unexplained disappearances of residents of a certain Moscow apartment, and vignettes involving Roman secret police. The version of The Master and Margarita that was served up to my parents had been scrubbed by censors, who eliminated 14,000 words-about 12 percent of the manuscript. The Master and Margarita weaves together three stories: (1) the appearance of Satan in Moscow in the early 1930s, (2) a love story between the Master-a writer hounded by critics-and Margarita, an unhappily married woman, and (3) the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate, the Gospel according to Bulgakov. Though this novel drew me in at a young age, and though I re-read it often, our relationship has required much maintenance and has not been harmonious. The Master and Margarita quickly became one of the most-read works of Russian literature, and its popularity seems to expand even as readers acknowledge not being able to understand much if any of it. On evening walks of nearly six decades ago, I listened to my awe-struck parents talk about the seemingly unpublishable masterpiece of a forgotten writer improbably seeing the light of day. ![]() Zemlyanoy Val, my street, is a few trolleybus stops away from his-Sadovaya. I was seven-too young to appreciate Bulgakov-when, in November 1966, the journal Moskva first serialized a heavily censored version of The Master and Margarita.īulgakov’s Moscow is my Moscow.
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