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Summary: One of the Best books in history.
Review: This masterpiece, has always been a favorite of mine, for its beautiful writing, hilarious characters, Faustian theme with a romantic twist, and satire. This particular edition with its annotations, added to the reading experience. I read the annotations, chapter by chapter, which describes the political background, references that only would make sense in Russian, to people who knew the times. Even if you have read it before, the annotations alone make it worth reading again.
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Summary: Bulgakov's Masterpiece
Review: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1967 Mirra Ginsburg translation is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. Re-reading the novel recently, I found the novel to be sublime and to transcend time. M& M is a timeless classic. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read imaginative and well-written literature. This book belongs with the very best. It shows Bulgakov to be a great writer, one of the few really great Soviet writers. There are other translations now and there are stage adaptations and even an opera of Master and Margarita. Mirra Ginsburg's 1967 translation still stands up and is very readable. There are translations that incorporate some of the passages cut out in the 1966-67 Russian version in MOSKVA. Nevertheless, Ginsburg's translation is excellent and stands up well. The republication edition is excellent. What can you say. This is a great book. It is highly recommended.Bulgakov wrote other stuff too, plays, novels, sketches, etc. The White Guard, Black Snow, The Heart of a Dog, Flight, are some of his other works. Bulgakov needs greater exposure in the US. His style will certaily appeal to most readers. The Master and Margarita is a 20th century classic, and required reading.
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Summary: nothing less than a miricle
Review: i am one of those unfortunate souls that suffers the burden of being born atheistic. God has never touched me, i have never glimpsed the divine. well, almost never. but then there is the master and margarita.... what can i say? somehow, bulgakov knew something about the intrinsic nature of the world and had the ability to share it. and i owe him a lot for it. the book is more than magic and satire- it is faith, in some way the ultimate sort of faith- do i know exactly what i mean? no- of course not. but i think most others who read the book can understand. i don't know if i will ever be able to shake my curse of atheism- but after reading this book, sometimes i think i see God.
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Summary: Sharp and funny satire, and very moving tragedy
Review: This is a brilliant novel, very funny, yet tragic, very moving, and very observant. _The Master and Margarita_ is set in Moscow, apparently in the '20s or '30s. One day a couple of literati are talking when they meet a strange man. Before long the man is laughing at there confident assertion that the Jesus and the Devil don't exist, and telling a story about Pontius Pilate and his encounter with Jesus, or Yeshua, and also predicting the death of one of the two men. When the death occurs, the other man goes mad. The strange man, who is, of course, the devil, and his associates, including most memorably a talking, gun-toting, very large, black cat, are spreading havoc throughout Moscow. Most spectacular is a catastrophic magic show. Those Muscovites who encounter the devilish group are mostly humiliated, sometimes killed or driven mad. One notable, perhaps ambiguous, exception, is the case of the Master, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate which has been excoriated by the figures in power in the Moscow literary world, and his lover Margarita. Margarita encounters the devil, and goes through hell itself in an attempt to free the Master. The novel is an odd combination of very sharp and funny satire, striking descriptive passages, and some very moving events. It also has the power of staying in your head after you read it. And I found the several long passages about Pilate and Yeshua and Matthias the Levite very affecting as well. An excellent book.
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Summary: Best Translation
Review: The only thing worth saying about this book in a forum which Bulgakov himself would surely have despised is this: don't read the Ginsburg translation, it is substandard. The Michael Glenny translation is much more lucid...its worth the wait.
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Summary: Master and Margarita
Review: I'm from Russia and I have read Bulgakov's book in Russian. The reason I'm writing this review is because I would want more Westerners to read the twentieth century Russian literature. I sometimes have a perception that if people do reach for Russian literature they reach for Tolstoy and Dostoyewski, ignoring the great twentieth century writers, one of whom is Bulkagov. Master and Margarita astonished me from the first time I read it. For the second time more things occured to me and more became even more mysterious(I am not one of those people who can read one book several times). You can read this book all your life and continue to enterpret it in a different ways. Master and Margarita is one of those novel's whose main theme you would never grasp. I often times read the political interpretations of this book, which I find very narrow and plain. The beauty of the novel lays in fact that there are so many abstract and realistic themes running accross that every reader will find something interesting in it. I would advice all those who read the book, in case of visiting Moscow, to go and see the Patriarch lake and the appartament 50, which really exists. There is this unbelivably mystical atmosphere which enhances if not the comprehension of the novel, but the strong feeling to it. Master and Margarita is one of my favorite books ever, and I'm convinced I will reach for it again in twenty years from now.
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Summary: Realo-magicalism was born here
Review: One evening last week, as I sat on a bench by Ware's Pond in the dwindling light, watching faint trails of muskrats in the waterlily-studded water of aluminum hue, I heard a knock on the door. I leaned out from Desolation Row and opened up a crack. A tall, naked redheaded woman, shining like the pond at sunset, kissed me with lips of ice. Frozen, I dug into a plate of roast duck and noodle soup. Strains of "Jumpin Jack Flash" accompanied my pea-green broom as I soared over Salem, Massachusetts out to sea with a walrus in sunglasses. As I headed to my local devils' union bash, I realized that Jesus was not all that people said he was, perhaps he was more. I danced at the oily zombie jamboree, broke up a few apartments on Beacon Hill and handed out dollar bills that later turned into confetti. I convinced the walrus that he'd definitely been framed by the purple Irving Snerd, who disappeared in the Virgin Islands while investigating phony leveraged buyouts. After all, his wife, the highly-suspicious May Alice Snerd, had been seen simultaneously eating a greasy hotdog in Boston, and stealing red and blue icons from a golden-domed church in Zagorsk. By the next morning, zonked out of my brain, but safe and well, I knew that I'd been involved in a political satire, a love story, a magical mystery tour---or, if none of these things were true---then I must have been reading THE MASTER AND MARGARITA ! This unbelievably original novel is like a Bob Dylan song---if you don't get it, just don't mess with it. It's impossible to explain. It's a feeling. It's an experience that will light up your days while you read it. You'll get sucked in and when you emerge on page 402, you'll be sorry there's no more. I could sit here and write some dry academic analysis, offer the odd, frail criticism, but I'm going to leave that to the literary honchos. "The absurdities of Communism", "the banality of tyranny" blah-blah-blah. OK, it's true. But a kiss is just a kiss, and so just remember this my fellow citizens of the world---Bulgakov has to have written one of the outstanding novels of the 20th century. Don't fail to read it. Fly off and as our compañeros say so aptly, "vuela tu mente". (Or the devil take you.)
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Summary: Russian classics,
Review: I also recomend Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Pushkin, Sergey Dovlatov,Mikhail Veller, etc...
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Summary: Avoid Glenny's tranlations as you would the plague
Review: The beautiful grad-student who strongly recommended Bulgakov's _Master & Margarita_ to me, was as adamant that I avoid Michael Glenny's translation. Glenny just doesn't seem to 'get it,' as I found out for myself when I mistakenly bought his translation of _Heart of a Dog_, only to have discard it and start over with Ginsberg's version.
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Summary: required reading
Review: I really had no idea what to expect from this book before I started it. I read the back and was immediately attracted to the Bizarre plot. It became my favourite book after the first chapter. For a week I existed to read this book. School, food and friends were just obstacles in the way of my reading this book. It just became greater and greater as it went on. Bulgukav describes settings and characters so well (and in so few words) you feel as if you are there. This book also carries the widest selection of odd and creepy characters in one novel. most of all this book led me to ask the question, how come all books can't be this good?
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