vintage bulgakov the master and margarita

Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet-and fellow lunatic-Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. This Master-as he calls himself-has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: 'Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.') Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital.

First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a 'translator' wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita.

Vintage bulgakov the master and margarita