THE MASTER AND MARGARITA: 50th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Mikhail Bulgakov (PDF)

Description

A 50th-anniversary Deluxe Edition of the incomparable 20th-century masterpiece of satire and fantasy, in a newly revised version of the acclaimed Pevear and Volokhonsky translation Nothing in the whole of literature compares with The Master and Margarita. One spring afternoon, the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow. Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem, each brimming with historical, imaginary, frightful, and wonderful characters. Written during the darkest days of Stalin’s reign, and finally published in 1966 and 1967, The Master and Margarita became a literary phenomenon, signaling artistic and spiritual freedom for Russians everywhere. This newly revised translation, by the award-winning team of Pevear and Volokhonsky, is made from the complete and unabridged Russian text.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Other reviewers have said that this binding is a stylistic choice by the publisher. I still hate it and predict that the individual “sections,” as they’re called, will quickly separate from the backing. I returned it. I had already read a different version. The content is beautiful! You’ll be glad you read a version – any version – (even this one) of this classic work.

⭐The content itself is a masterpiece, and this deluxe paperback edition from Penguin Classics is nicely made. It’s kind of half way between a true paperback and a hard cover book. True, the pages are glued in, not smyth sewn like Dover books, so it may affect durability, but I knew that going in. And to all the 1 star reviews from irate customers complaining about mis-cut paper edges and “faulty manufacturing”, they obviously don’t know what “Deckle Edge” means! Please google it people! There are degrees of deckling, and this book is only deckled on the edge opposite the spine, plus it’s only a little bit deckled. I actually wish it was more extreme.

⭐Before you dive into this review, know this. I’m a native Russian, and a writer, and I have just completed a feat of rereading the novel in Russian and reading first Ginsburg and then Pevear & Volokhonsky translations, back to back, to compare. And Ginsburg’s translation will give you the best feeling for the language, the culture, and the story. It’s the bomb. This translation left me in tatters, it didn’t speak to me as Bulgakov, it even impoverished his style for me. The rating you see is for the novel itself, which is the work of art. Now, to the review itself.The first time I read The Master and Margarita in Russian, it was, out of all places, in Berlin. I was a teenager, and I lived in Berlin with my father and his new wife and my half-sister, because my father was a writer and a journalist and was sent by Soviet Union to Berlin to be the correspondent for a large Russian newspaper agency. I remember reading the book so vividly, that even today every detail is etched in my brain like a colorful photograph. The soft bright chair I sat in, with my back toward the window, the book in my lap, the pages rustling, and the image of Margarita, most importantly, of her knee, the knee that’s been kissed over and over and how it turned blue. And the cat, the black cat that could talk. That’s all I remember, plus the feeling of fascination I got. And now, over 20 years later, I have read it again, after becoming a writer myself 2 years ago, not knowing back in my teens that I would ever write, but being struck by the genius of Bulgakov. And, my, oh my, rereading it now I understood for the first time what the book was about. I sort of thought of it as a fairy tale back in my teens, I felt something underneath it, but couldn’t get it. I got it now, and I cried, I cried for Bulgakov, for his imprisonment as a writer in the country that oppressed him to the last of his days, and I cried because he refused to be broken, and because he has written a masterpiece, and I was holding it in my hands, reliving it like so many people, many many years after he died.As to the story. It’s not just one story, and not even two, it’s four. A story of love, and of darkness, and of life and death. There are four narratives, the love between Master and Margarita, the strange visitors and Satan who come to Moscow, the story of Moscow life itself, the city, the people, and the story of Yeshua in the ancient walls of Yershalayim. Each has its own flavor, breathes its own air, and weaves into one book that tethers on that notion that no work of art can be destroyed, “manuscripts don’t burn”, says Satan, and that’s Bulgakov’s pain, him against the system that wanted to crush him, and didn’t. He escaped. The irony of the book is that, in some sense, it’s autobiographical, and that makes it even more tragic. But the satire! Oh, the satire! I don’t know how many times I snorted coffee and tea out of my nose, because I have this habit of drinking hot drinks while reading, curled up on the couch. So many memories burst on the scene, so many authentic Russian quirks and habits and characters, the wealth of which I have nearly forgotten over my 16 years in US, and which dazzled my mind like fireworks, albeit of course, because I was reading it in Russian, and I’m about to start reading two translations in English, one by Mirra Ginsburg, and another by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Because, if there was ever a book worth reading 5, 10, 20 times in a row, it is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, his last book written over the course of 10 years, and not quite completed… he narrated changes to his wife right up to his death. No matter. It is perfect. Read it.

⭐I have very mixed feelings writing a review of The Master and the Margarita. If you speak with practically any Russian who has graduated college in Russia, they have read the novel, and they smile when you mention it. And the story behind the novel is perhaps just as important as the novel itself. Bulgakov wrote it between 1928 and 1940 during the height of Stalin’s Reign of Terror, and it wasn’t until 1966 that it was published, and when it was published, it went viral.Furthermore, Bulgakov’s family and Bulgakov himself had supported the anti-Bolshevik White Army during the Civil War and he continued to write satires of the existing regime. He should have been erased, but for some God-only-knows reason Stalin liked him, so he lived. Bulgakov even wrote Stalin that he wanted to get out of the USSR, and lived.The novel itself is not only hard for a non-Russian speaker to read because of the difficulty in following the difficult Russian names and nicknames (though with some help and effort you can deal with this), but in the translation there are a lot of word plays that are lost, especially in people names. Additionally, many of the places and characters and organizations and occurrences are closely based on 1920s-1930s early Soviet life. This is a large part of the novel and is also all lost to all but the most knowledgeable modern reader.Nevertheless, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s introduction and frequent footnotes (easily accessed on the Kindle version) at least give the reader a feeling for what they are missing. For instance, knowing about the struggles the early Soviet Republic had trying to control currency is essential to be able to laugh at the scenes where money falls from the ceiling of the theater, only to change to useless pieces of paper the next day. Also, knowing about the severe housing shortage in Moscow following the Bolshevik take over makes it funny when the uncle of the deceased poet comes to Moscow not to participate in the funeral, but to lay claim to the deceased’s empty apartment unit.The scene where the main character goes for a swim (?to save someone from drowning) only to have his clothes stolen and switched out for clowns clothing….and then have this guy investigated by a seemingly relatively well-meaning psychiatrist (Dr. Stravinsky) for running around town all dressed up as a clown is funny on many levels.Admittedly, this is the second time I read this book, the first time about 7 years ago, and I didn’t get much out of it then. Since then, I have read a fair deal of late Russian and Soviet history, especially Figes (see all my reviews of him, he’s super fantastic), so when I read M & M this time, it made a lot more sense and I appreciated the satire and humor much more. There is a gradesaver.com Cliff’s Notes style study guide with chapter summaries, that I found helpful as I read along. Laura Weeks also has a short paperback on M & M. I found the introduction very interesting regarding the background, though the later chapters were beyond my level of interest.Good luck and I hope you appreciate the book.

⭐In Chapter 21 of The Master and Margarita the maid Natasha, having been transformed into a witch and revelling in the freedom that the metamorphosis has brought her, exclaims “We, too, want to live and fly!”. Many in Stalinist Russia must have longed to ‘live and fly’ to escape the fear, tyranny and grey uniformity of Soviet life, but few had the opportunity and still fewer the courage to do so. This novel is about many things, but to my mind it is mainly about courage and freedom – the courage to be free. One of its recurring themes is that “cowardice is the most terrible of vices” and throughout the story it is the cowards, those who have made their compromises with tyranny and who lack the courage to seek freedom who are punished.On a warm spring afternoon at full moon Satan, attended by a bizarre retinue of demons including a huge black cat that walks on its hind legs, talks, drinks vodka and plays chess, arrives in Moscow, presents himself as ‘Professor Woland’ a theatrical magician and for the following few days presides as a kind of ‘Lord of Misrule’ over a series of hilariously disruptive events that cause widespread hysteria. While it becomes clear to the reader what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the world of the novel it is not at all clear to most of those citizens of Moscow who encounter Satan/Woland and his demons. For the people of Moscow have made their compromises with tyranny to the extent that their perceptions have become so distorted that that they do not recognize tyranny for what it is, but believe it to be good and regard anything that disrupts the status quo as bad. Woland represents the urge to escape, to be free and apart from Natasha the only characters who act on this urge are Margarita who longs to escape from a loveless marriage and to be reunited with her lover, a persecuted novelist (‘the Master’), who has disappeared and the Master himself. The other characters who encounter Woland and his entourage are too immersed in the petty concerns of their everyday lives, their envy, their ambition, their crass materialism and their fearful and unquestioning acceptance of things as they are to dare to desire freedom.The novel is filled with incident and is very fast paced and I got the distinct impression that the driving force behind all of this is Bulgakov’s anger – his anger at Soviet society for its acceptance of and collaboration with tyranny and his anger at himself for what he believed to be his own cowardice in the face of tyranny. He invents a world in which he can wreak revenge and creates his own version of Satan to be his avenging angel. Bulgakov’s Satan is not the all evil Satan of the Christian imagination. True, he does bad things to bad people as Satan is expected to do, but uncharacteristically he also does good things to good people; not only is he capable of doing good as well as evil, but he also has a sense of humour: through Satan/Woland, Bulgakov can fantasize about laughing at and at the same time punishing the bureaucrats, spies, informers and busybodies who made day-to-day Soviet life so intolerable.Much of Bulgakov’s animus is directed at the complacent Muscovite literary establishment, who should have known better, who should have spoken out on behalf of the oppressed, but were so seduced by their privileged status and its attendant material benefits and so cowed that they ignored the reality of the world that they lived in. It was said by Nabokov that there was no such thing as Soviet literature as the truly great figures of Russian literature in the Soviet period were forced to become dissidents to be true to themselves and their art. It was the mediocrities who did not become dissidents and who reaped the rewards for their collaboration. Bulgakov shows his contempt for them by portraying them as the members of the literary club Massolit who are less interested in writing than in dachas, Crimean holidays and above all their fine club restaurant from which members of the public are excluded. The Master, in contrast, is not part of the literary establishment. He has written a novel about the moral cowardice of Pontius Pilate, who was so terrified of the consequences of defying the Emperor Tiberius that he submitted to the blackmail of the high priest and acted contrary to his own conscience and inclinations by agreeing to the execution of Jesus. The Master’s novel has been denied publication presumably because the parallels with Soviet life are too obvious for comfort, and a campaign against its author by a group of influential literary critics has driven the Master to burn the manuscript and has led to his being arrested and subsequently seeking refuge in a psychiatric hospital. There are parallels with Bulgakov’s life in that he was himself the victim of a politically motivated press campaign in the 1920’s. The Master and Margarita was not published during his lifetime and at one stage he even burned the manuscript. But, as Woland says, “Manuscripts do not burn”…The Master and Margarita is a wonderful comic fantasy in which supernatural happenings occur in a world that does not accept the supernatural as a possibility and much of the comedy is provided by the reactions of Soviet citizens and officials to the outrageous tricks that are perpetrated on them. One of the funniest incidents in the book is when a pompous citizen who has temporarily been metamorphosed into a hog and forced to attend Satan’s grand ball demands from Satan a certificate attesting to this fact as evidence to prove to his wife and to the authorities where he has spent the night. I suppose it is the portrayal of Satan that caused the Russian Orthodox Church to find the novel offensive and that in 2006 induced a religious extremist to vandalize the Bulgakov museum in Moscow. This is ironic because Bulgakov was a Christian and it was his outrage at the crude anti-religious propaganda of the Soviet authorities that prompted him to write the novel, but Satan as the advocate of religious belief and the opponent of official Soviet atheism even in the context of a satire was clearly too much for conventional Christians to swallow. It is also probable that they were offended that the Master’s unorthodox retelling of the Gospel story is featured in four chapters as a novel within the novel, part of which is actually narrated by Satan. In the circumstances the fact that the atmosphere of ancient Jerusalem (in the novel called ‘Yershalaim’) and the events surrounding the crucifixion are brought to life much more vividly than in the Gospel accounts cannot have pleased the church authorities.I found it difficult to put the book down so engrossed did I become in the world that Bulgakov created and as soon as I finished it I started to read it again. His Moscow seems very immediate and alive and the small-minded, sly, officious and corrupt Soviet citizens and officials that he describes are sadly all too credible. The general unpleasantness of life in the Stalinist period, the atmosphere of fear and distrust, the denunciations, the disappearances, the privations of life in communal apartments, the privileges enjoyed by the favoured few such as hard currency shops and exclusive clubs are all objects of Bulgakov’s satire. Even though it is set in Stalinist Moscow at the height of the purges and show trials in the late 1930’s the atmosphere of the novel is not oppressive. This is a Moscow of the imagination in which demons with a sense of fun play pranks against the dour and humourless citizens and officials of the communist state. It is hardly surprising that Bulgakov did not seek to have the novel published during his lifetime..

⭐Trying to avoid sounding pompous here, but this is an absolute zinger of a novel. First off, it’s very funny and simultaneously profoundly serious. It’s a social critique along the lines of Gogol, it’s a political critique of Stalinist USSR and it is deeply religious, the action swinging from 20thC Russia to Roman-occupied Judea and Christ’s crucifixion. Very Russian (all the Big Questions) and totally universal. As soon as I’d finished it, I re-read it. I read a lot; this is the best thing I’ve read in the last 15 years and would be in my top 8 or so ever.

⭐Absolutely stunning work of fiction written when it could so easily have been a death sentence to Bulgakov if discovered. From other reviews it seems that it is just beyond some people – their weakness not the novel’s. This new translation is a good one, and is based in the complete, uncensored original, unavailable to the early translators. Please note that the Penguin ‘deluxe’ edition has ‘American cut’ pages which is a style of binding not a defect as some reviewers complain. Again, it’s their failure to understand not a problem with the book.

⭐I’ve read this on Kindle, and I also own a very nice paperback edition with Russian textile designs on the cover released by Penguin but this deluxe edition is an even more beautiful presentation. With a very striking cover illustration featuring many of the characters and an unusual and pleasing method of cutting the pages which leaves it with an old and fake battered feel, this is a present I bought for someone and I’m finding it very hard not to keep it for myself. The story reads like Alice in Wonderland for adults and it constantly surprising the reading with a parade of extraordinary events and characters woven into 2 twin tracks of storyline separated by time. Charming and bewildering in equal measure while remaining supremely engaging throughout.

⭐This is simply the single best piece of art ever created in my view. Part of the reason for ordering this copy is that I’ve literally worn out my existing 18 year old copy that I’ve now read multiple times (something I never do) and lent it to friends so often as a recommendation – which they’ve all loved. If you want to read a book that will literally give you a cinematic experience in every scene, this is the one!

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