In the Face of Constant Censorship, Bulgakov Kept Writing
lithub.com
lithub.com
Of course now with the internet there is help from wikipedia:
I found it a highly enjoyable book and, while I'm sure I missed many references, it gave me better understanding of what it must have been like living in the USSR in those times.
I'm not a great reader though and read mostly non-fiction now. I go slow. I tried to read the "sound and the fury" by Faulkner once and didn't get past the first chapter.
Old school web design is so fast.
thanks!
There is also an active Bulgakov facebook page [2] with things like fan art and informations about upcoming adaptations.
As a matter of disclosure, I created the facebook page in 2008, but it has been run for many years now by Jan Vanhellemont, the man who is also responsible for [1]. I consider him to be the foremost fan of Master and Margarita on the English language internet.
[1] http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/ [2] https://www.facebook.com/m.a.bulgakov/
M&M is an obvious example; there are many (Tolstoy, Dumas, Conrad, Zola, Proust and, in more modern times, Patrick O'Brian) where historical, biographical and technical annotations would be hugely useful and fun. In the case of translations, concurrent access to the original would also be awesome.
One of the earliest web versions of this that impressed me was a "Web 1.0" hypertext version of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which is a poem constructed almost entirely out of allusions, and which makes little sense without the necessary annotations.
Do any of the eBook formats support anything like this? Have anyone done this in a way that's accessible in any meaningful way on a Kindle?
Heavily annotated books pre-date the Internet - my edition of M&M footnotes and endnotes the hell out of the book for context.
Along with Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn also offers deep insight into the soviet mindset, between his better known works (Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, Ivan Denisovich) and his lesser known works (Incident at Krechetovka Station, Matryona's House).
One thing that both excelled at was getting their work published, not purely through samizdat, by making their allegorical allusions clear to those who knew what they were looking for but utterly opaque to the poorly educated soviet censors.
After Lenin's death and the ascension of Stalin in late 1920th, though, the program was dismantled and the restrictions returned in both economics and public life. And then amplified to the peak of Great Terror in the 1930th.
As pvg points out, Kevin Moss's notes (http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/) will reveal whole new layers of the onion when you re-read the book.
It's hard to answer this question. Is there any Russian literature you've read and enjoyed?
I'm afraid I haven't read much other Russian literature, as I prefer scifi, so the closest I got to the Eastern bloc is Lem...
I think my main problem with Master and Margarita is that I don't know much about the context of the era, and it feels like most of the book is subtle jabs at the society and political climate of the time.
Kevin Moss's site linked upthread is a good place to start for context that may make you retroactively enjoy the book more.
I'm not sure it would work in translation though - as the plot goes, it would be kind of simple, especially for our 21th century eyes, but the inimitable Bulgakov style adds a lot.
EDIT:
For me, the appeal is in the interplay of the ultra paranoid and cynical life in the Stalinist USSR and the supernatural and goofy exploits of the Devil and his entourage who happen to visit Moscow.
The love story between the two main human characters is just the icing on the cake, but in my opinion not that important.
Not to mention that the "book within the book" about Pontius Pilate provided an entertaining intro to one of the fundamental Biblical stories for the atheist me, although now I tend to skip it when I re-read the book every once in a while.
EDIT2: Forgot to mention that the style it is written in (in Russian) is unique; it's very tongue-in-cheek: respectful to the established order and authorities on the surface but derisively satirical underneath. Nobody else wrote like that.
Hmm, yes, I do agree that it is interesting to see how everyone reacts to accusations of "holding foreign currency", but I think I'm missing most of the humour because I just don't know what it was like to live in a Stalinist sociopolitical climate.
I did enjoy the sub-book about Pontius Pilate indeed, and I also agree that the style feels very unique. I think the story with the Devil is just an excuse to orchestrate these unique situations and write the satirical/subversive reactions. I think that's what I don't like, the disjointed narrative without much of an arc, because I'm missing most of the subtext that is the payoff for the scenes.
Bulgakov's writings, if discovered, would have lead to him being executed. To people who lived in the system, their was an unacknowledged understanding that something bad was happening as people would mysteriously disappear on a regular basis. The movie "The Inner Circle" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103838/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_p... ) and "Burnt By The Sun" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111579/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 ) are good depictions of what life was like during those times. It makes the high anxiety and paranoia of most characters in M & M much more understandable.
Bulgakov and his writings were well known to the authorities.
I think this is a bit of a red herring - the book is funny throughout and the humour is not dependent on a deep knowledge of the sociopolitical climate (which, incidentally, was not yet quite 'Stalinist'). I first read it in my mid-teens (in Russian) and didn't catch a bunch of that stuff either - but it was funny. Just like you don't need to know an awful lot about 19th century Britain to grasp the wry tone and irony in Austen or Dickens.
Try reading the Burgin/O'Connor translation and see how it goes. It's possible it might still not work for you but an audiobook of some unknown translation is an unfortunately pessimal way to approach this particular work - you're now dealing with not one but two layers of interpretation of a difficult-to-translate book.
Maybe I just spent too much time looking for an overarching plot instead of enjoying the ludicrous situations.
But the speakers are first-rate, especially Koroviev in a gorgeous Austrian dialect.
But I cannot find the download link. br.de is simply impossible to use. I've downloaded it a few months ago, and I remember it was difficult to find then, as well.
Who could be other contenders?
Solzh? Iskander? Rasputin? Nabokov?
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge? Life and Fate? Moscow - Petushki?
But Russian is also very hard to translate to English, for several reasons; it's a heavily idiom-based language, full of common phrases (that every Russian knows) that an author can turn into puns or allusions. If the translator chooses to rewrite using the equivalent English idiom, the original meaning may be lost; whereas if it's translated literally, the reader won't know that it's a common saying that the author has subverted. The same thing goes with words that have multiple meanings, where the ambiguity itself resonates within the phrasing, or where the word has historical subtext or whatever.
But translators also often get stuff wrong. Plenty of people have pointed out very clear errors in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations that are based on misunderstandings of the original text. Bulgakov also frequently writes on several levels (there's a lot of subtext and humour), and it's often hard to replicate the intended meaning, so translators end up with something that isn't quite right. Here [1] is some discussion with concrete examples.
[1] http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/translation_wars_on...