Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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love, and of personal courage.
These three stories, in form as well as content, embrace virtually all
that was excluded from official Soviet ideology and its literature. But if
the confines of 'socialist realism' are utterly exploded, so are the
confines of more traditional novelistic realism. The Master and Margarita
as
a whole is a consistently free verbal construction which, true to its own
premises, can re-create ancient Jerusalem in the smallest physical detail,
but can also alter the specifics of the New Testament and play variations on
its principal figures, can combine the realities of Moscow life with
witchcraft, vampirism, the tearing off and replacing of heads, can describe
for several pages the sensation of flight on a broomstick or the gathering
of the infamous dead at Satan's annual spring ball, can combine the most
acute sense of the fragility of human life with confidence in its
indestructibility. Bulgakov underscores the continuity of this verbal world
by having certain phrases -- 'Oh, gods, my gods', 'Bring me poison', 'Even
by moonlight I have no peace' -- migrate from one character to another, or
to the narrator. A more conspicuous case is the Pilate story itself,
successive parts of which are told by Woland, dreamed by the poet Homeless,
written by the master, and read by Margarita, while the whole preserves its
stylistic unity. Narrow notions of the 'imitation of reality' break down
here. But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the
novel
as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol,
of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius. The mobile but
personal narrative voice of the novel, the closest model for which Bulgakov
may have found in Gogol's Dead Souls, is the perfect medium for
this
continuous verbal construction. There is no multiplicity of narrators in the