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The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

Start date: December 1, 2021

Finish date: December 31, 2021

Discussion: Current Group Reads

Discussion leader: Lynn

Why we're reading this: December 2021 Revisit the Shelf Read

June 2016 New School Group Read
[close] December 2021 Revisit the Shelf Read

June 2016 New School Group Read

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What Members Thought

Sep 10, 2013 Melanti rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, group-reads, classics, magical-realism, 1001-books, 2014

I was confused but amused until about halfway through when the titular characters were introduced and I lost any faint clue I had of what the book was about...

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Apr 22, 2023 Nina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2023-aty

This was slow-going at first because the early parts of the novel are more than a little bit confusing and because the titular Master and Margarita arrive on the scene fairly late in the game. Though I might have gotten more out of it if I had read it for a class with the guidance of a knowledgeable professor to help me understand some of what is going on in it, particularly the background details of Soviet society in that time period, I was able to get the gist of it for the most part and the f This was slow-going at first because the early parts of the novel are more than a little bit confusing and because the titular Master and Margarita arrive on the scene fairly late in the game. Though I might have gotten more out of it if I had read it for a class with the guidance of a knowledgeable professor to help me understand some of what is going on in it, particularly the background details of Soviet society in that time period, I was able to get the gist of it for the most part and the farther along I went, the more I enjoyed it.

As a German major, I spent a lot of time with Goethe’s Faust, which definitely helped in understanding this, though Bulgakov’s devil, in many ways, is a more complex character than Goethe’s. He demands courtesy, sympathy, and well-learned politesse (as one of Bulgakov’s many fans put it), but those who make a Teufelspakt with this particular devil need not suffer the tortures of the damned, provided that they make their bargain with him in good faith and with unselfish motives. Those who are motivated by typical human foibles such as greed and hubris tend to find their encounters with Woland and his minions painful, humiliating, and occasionally lethal. However, those who are motivated by purer emotions such as love, as is the case with Margarita, may be delighted by the experience and find themselves gleefully mounting their broomsticks and flying away to smash in the windows of literary Philistines.

Though Margarita’s witchy behavior initially seems to mirror that of Woland’s demonic minions, such as Behemoth, the arsonist tomcat, she immediately desists when she finds that her actions are distressing a small child. It is also telling that the first request she makes of Woland is to release a woman who is being punished in the afterlife for the same desperate crime that Goethe’s Margarete had committed, i.e. killing her child after its father abandoned her. When Behemoth responds to Margarita’s inquiry as to what had happened to the man who impregnated the woman with “[W]hat has [he] to do with it? It was not he who smothered the infant in the woods!”, this felt like a feminist indictment of a patriarchal society in which women are held hostage to men’s sexual whims, while the men are allowed to go about their merry way. Though Gretchen’s predicament in Goethe’s Faust was largely the result of Mephisto’s mechanizations, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Bulgakov’s “woman with the handkerchief”, Frieda, whose plight resembles that of so many women throughout the ages. I’ve always felt that Goethe let Faust get away with things a little too easily, i.e., shifting responsibility for what happens to Mephisto (and even, to a lesser extent, Gretchen) is a bit of a cop out.

The fact that I managed to find so much to say about what is almost a throw-away scene is indicative of how many layers there are to unpack within this book. The more time I spend contemplating it, the more I like it. It’s the kind of book that demands to be re-read, though if and when I choose to do so, I’ll try to find a different translation, as the one I was reading by Mira Ginsburg felt a bit clumsy and uneven at times. According to the repository of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, the Burgin and O'Connor version is widely considered to be one of the best translations, though I could also go with the trustworthy Pevear and Volokhonsky, depending on which one is easiest to get my hands on.

Call it 4.5 stars rounded up to 5 because it helped inspire one of my favorite Rolling Stones songs and because I adore the maniacal tomcat arsonist. ...more

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