Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Feb 2015
Michael Glenny translation; Vintage Classics edition with introduction by Will Self

Bit underwhelmed. It was a good and original adventure, sometimes made me laugh, and I was always interested to find out what would happen. But, other than a few chapters, not wow. Not quite understanding what so many adore.

And this is one of the first books I remember. It was quite low down on family bookshelves when I was a child, and its spine (of the first UK hardback edition) is one of the very few things I can remember seeing without being able to read it, its colours and shape only, and then the words soon became words. I long thought of 'The master and margarita' as one person, that they were two titles held by one person, a margarita probably being some form of exotic aristocracy. (A sophy was one after all.) Kids read so much about royalty, so it's hardly surprising to overidentify it. The book always sounded a bit boring and I thought it would have been a chore to read. Hence taking several decades to get round to reading it.

In the same translation, naturally, as it would have been had I read that copy as a teenager, but not dusty and sneeze-prone. (And with a very good introduction by Will Self, which I already quoted elsewhere months ago. Its influence on his writing and, I think on Gaiman, is evident. In that respect reading The Master & Margarita is like finding a missing link.) I find it strange how few people seek out a particular translation for similar personal reasons. I also compared it with the preview of Pevear & Volokhonsky, the only other translation easily available in the UK, and needless to say much preferred this one. I find P&V's style ugly and am trying to confine my use of them to Tolstoy so other Russian writers have a different voice. And I infinitely prefer the Britishness of 'beer & minerals', 'lime trees' and ' the haunted flat' to Americanisms. Patriarch's Ponds, despite the thoroughly un British name, I kept imagining as an English park, such was Glenny's use of detail and atmosphere. But one of my reasons for reading this version is to read what British people read in the 60s and 70s, and many others still later - the book as part of our culture, more than for its historically displaced Russianness (written in the late 30s and not published there in full until Gorbachev). So glad that Michael Glenny is related to Misha Glenny - father and son, in fact - who's the first person I'd think of when seeing 'M. Glenny', never mind in the context of Russia.

Episodes I loved:
Most of all, Margarita's flight. There is such a lightness and abandon in the writing as soon as she has put on the (not named as such) flying ointment. It is all 'wheeee!' and Peter Pannish mischief and no quibbling. (She's Peter, not that tutting Wendy.) Utterly carried me along with her. Similarly, the party.
The master and his basement flat. Needless to say, this also reminds me deeply of someone - about whom I felt much as Margarita does about him. And it has stronger atmosphere than much of the rest. I used to have a basement flat too. Some people think they are depressing, but as long as they are not damp they are wonderful little burrow-refuges which have the sense of being sequestered from the world just as M&M and he and I both desired.

I think I've read enough iconoclastic retellings of the Bible. Wasn't all that interested in those chapters - I liked and appreciated the characterisations, but it was all so long.

The final sentence of the blurb, on the back of this Vintage Classics edition, is silly: Only the Master... and Margarita...can resist his onslaught. Makes them sound like superheroes, and gives an impression of the story's trajectory very different from the actual one.

What I want to read now are a few scholarly analyses. There is great ambiguity about the devil - he is a force which is both contrary to and in agreement with the Communist authorities; he is not harmful to everyone, although he is to many. 'Woland' vaguely suggests 'Woden' and the devil as merely one of the old gods - but otherwise this Satan exists in a Christian cosmology. Bulgakov seems to suggest another way between pure rationalist atheism (arguing against an atheist state and its enforcement... I can't imagine hardcore Dawkins fans loving this, those who still think even the moderately religious should be considered mad, and don't seemed to have pondered their similarity to the Soviets) and the traditional theocracy with its strict views and notions of heresy. As a general idea this is so familiar and acceptable to me there's no need to say it - but it's also done in an odd way I can't quite get my head round, so I may be missing something. Or maybe I just read it when I was too old, and had already met a lot of the ideas via other, later, sources; there's no doubt it would seem amazing and revolutionary in some contexts, historical or in a person's life. Over the past ten years, I've noticed that a lot of people I like like The Master and Margarita: cumulatively it's become a positive sign that someone likes it, because of the existing friends who do, and my rating doesn't seem likely to change that.


The above is a paste of a review I wrote in February when I was sick of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, and conveniently dovetailed that with giving up the site for Lent. (I don't usually do Lent.) In the months since, the story and certain scenes have stayed with me far more vividly than most novels I read around then or afterwards; I am starting to understand its great appeal from this, more than from my reading experience itself.