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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

I read the The Master and Margarita for a literature class at University. It was a fascinating but confusing book, but lots of references which made it ideal to get some help by someone who scope and historical context (USSR being at its end when I read it).

Of course now with the internet there is help from wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

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Readers may find the Master and Margarita website[1] to be very thorough in providing the background information, plot and character summaries, and other supplementary materials. It is the best resource I know on the subject

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/

I often wish for interactive, annotated, "hypertextual" versions of books -- technologically it should be trivial to build.

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?

> I often wish for interactive, annotated, "hypertextual" versions of books -- technologically it should be trivial to build.

Heavily annotated books pre-date the Internet - my edition of M&M footnotes and endnotes the hell out of the book for context.

Of course. I was referring to digital e-books.

I read M+M in college. Later I had a Russian girlfriend and found that I didn't have a clue what it was about. Understanding Animal Farm is pretty easy because we get the references. But understanding M+M without a Russian history background is impossible. Still, even without that background, it's a fun read.

Don't feel too bad though about not fully understanding it - M+M is one of my favorite books, and I've re-read it may times, and have read tons of comments, and still I recently found a lecture course on it that showed me I haven't properly understood several important aspects of it. That's how it goes with great literature - it works on many levels.

The Master and Margarita also has a lot of details from biblical history that help making sense of it... I read it when I was taking a class from a Dead Sea Scroll archaeologist about how the bible was written and modern interpretations of it. So we read some of Gilgamesh, Old Testament, Dead Sea scrolls, Paradise Lost, and The Master and Margarita, among others (here's some version of the syllabus: http://web-app.usc.edu/soc/syllabus/20111/60056.doc)

There is much more extensive and better (and pre-wikipedia vintage, to boot) help at

http://cr.middlebury.edu/bulgakov/public_html/

Thats excellent. I'm going to go though it later when I have more time.

Old school web design is so fast.

thanks!

The mini-series from a few years ago is very good and the English subtitles for it were pretty good. (I read each of the 3 major english translations and the Russian version as well and I think the mini-series is better than all 3 english ones).

Did u enjoy it? I started reading it, but stopped early on.

I think that you need to know context well to enjoy it. I believe that translation may kill a lot from it

I tried reading the Ginsburg translation and didn't get very far. Found it to be wooden and stilted. Recently I started reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation and I'm having a much better time of it. It has footnotes that explain some of the references, and I'm just finding it much easier to read from a prose-style standpoint.

According to my russian wife who studied both russian and english literature, the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is by far the best. Not only does it provide a great introduction and footnotes, it also manages to capture the spirit of the original.

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 think it would be hard to get through without the discussions and some guidance. The professor (real not in the book) was pretty good at making it more interesting.

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.

I don't know much about Russian history beyond the usual stuff and I thought it was great. Some of the crazy surreal set pieces are unforgettable.

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