| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780802130112 | | Publisher: Grove Press | | Publish Date: 9/1/1987 | | Buy.com Sku: 30154253 | | Item#: RLDTVN | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 10920 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.5L x 1T |
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| | | I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one ever seemed to sleep, and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories of their culture and their ancestors and their ongoing lives. Bulgakov taught me to hear something in those stories that I had not yet clearly heard. One could call it, in terms that would soon thereafter gain wide currency, "magical realism". The deadpan mix of the fantastic and the realistic was at the heart of the Vietnamese mythos. It is at the heart of the present zeitgeist. And it was not invented by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as wonderful as his One Hundred Years of Solitude is. Garcia Marquez's landmark work of magical realism was predated by nearly three decades by Bulgakov's brilliant masterpiece of a novel. That summer in Saigon a vodka-swilling, talking black cat, a coven of beautiful naked witches, Pontius Pilate, and a whole cast of benighted writers of Stalinist Moscow and Satan himself all took up permanent residence in my creative unconscious. Their presence, perhaps more than anything else from the realm of literature, has helped shape the work I am most proud of. I'm often asked for a list of favorite authors. Here is my advice. Read Bulgakov. Look around you at the new century. He will show you things you need to see.
Annotation:
An ironic parable on power and its corruption, on good and evil, and on human frailty and the strength of love. The Devil appears in Moscow accompanied by a retinue of characters including a large vodka-drinking, pistol toting, black cat named Behemoth, the beautiful Margarita, and a writer known only as "The Master." These characters are joined by Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ to combine in a wildly entertaining and unforgettable tale.
Bulgakov tirelessly reworked the text of this book, going through eight separate versions in twelve years, the final corrections being dictated by Bulgakov to his wife after he had gone blind. Banned for decades in the Soviet Union, it was first published there in a censored version in 1966.
| PraiseDetroit News
"A wild surrealistic romp... Brilliantly flamboyant and outrageous." - Joyce Carol OatesNewsweek
"Fine, funny, imaginative....'The Master and Margarita' stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative." - Saul Maloff Time
"Bulgakov's most daring work. Its publication for the first time in Russia is part of a literary rebellion that is sweeping through Soviet letters." New York Times Book Review
"A classic of 20th-century fiction." London Review of Books
"[F]unny and frightening....Bulgakov...was writing it, without any hope or thought of publication, in a time and place where arbitrary arrests and disappearances were a common occurrence, and yet where people managed to devise for themselves...a fable of normality. Bulgakov confronts this fable with a further fable..." - Michael Wood 10/16/1997 Publishers Weekly
This uncensored translation of Bulgakov's posthumously published masterpiece of black magic and black humor restores its slyest digs and sharpest jabs at Stalin's regime, which suppressed it. Writing in a punning, soaring prose thick with contemporary historical references and political irony, Bulgakov (1891-1940) did not make things easy for future translators. The story itself is demanding: the arrival of the Devil and his entourage in Stalin's Moscow frames a Faustian tale of a suppressed writer (the Master) and his devoted lover (his Margarita), set against a realistic narrative the Master's rejected manuscript of Pontius Pilate's police state in Jerusalem. An immediate contemporary classic when it was first serialized in Moscow in censored form in 1967-68, the novel suffered in its previous English translations, which were either incomplete or stylistically loose. This new translation, with its accuracy and depth, finally does justice to the politically and verbally outrageous qualities of the original. Careful footnotes explain and contextualize Bulgakov's dense allusions to, and in-jokes about, life under Stalin. (Sept.) 06/26/1995 |
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