"Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

These three stories, in form as well as content, embrace virtually all
that was excluded from official Soviet ideology and its literature. But if
the confines of 'socialist realism' are utterly exploded, so are the
confines of more traditional novelistic realism. The Master and Margarita as
a whole is a consistently free verbal construction which, true to its own
premises, can re-create ancient Jerusalem in the smallest physical detail,
but can also alter the specifics of the New Testament and play variations on
its principal figures, can combine the realities of Moscow life with
witchcraft, vampirism, the tearing off and replacing of heads, can describe
for several pages the sensation of flight on a broomstick or the gathering
of the infamous dead at Satan's annual spring ball, can combine the most
acute sense of the fragility of human life with confidence in its
indestructibility. Bulgakov underscores the continuity of this verbal world
by having certain phrases -- 'Oh, gods, my gods', 'Bring me poison', 'Even
by moonlight I have no peace' -- migrate from one character to another, or
to the narrator. A more conspicuous case is the Pilate story itself,
successive parts of which are told by Woland, dreamed by the poet Homeless,
written by the master, and read by Margarita, while the whole preserves its
stylistic unity. Narrow notions of the 'imitation of reality' break down
here. But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel
as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol,
of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius. The mobile but
personal narrative voice of the novel, the closest model for which Bulgakov
may have found in Gogol's Dead Souls, is the perfect medium for this
continuous verbal construction. There is no multiplicity of narrators in the
novel. The voice is always the same. But it has unusual range, picking up,
parodying, or ironically undercutting the tones of the novel's many
characters, with undertones of lyric and epic poetry and old popular tales.
Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that
irony and buffoonery are expressions of 'the deepest contemplation of life
in all its conditionality'. It is not by chance that his stage adaptations
of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing
of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific 'influences' stands the
age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its
reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes -- a
tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov's
countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's Rabelais and His
World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as
Bulgakov's novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita.
The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it,
Bulgakov's wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link
between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical
situation from the same cultural basis.
Many observations from Bakhtin's study seem to be aimed directly at
Bulgakov's intentions, none more so than his comment on Rabelais's travesty
of the 'hidden meaning', the 'secret', the 'terrifying mysteries' of
religion, politics and economics: 'Laughter must liberate the gay truth of
the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear,
suffering, and violence.' The settling of scores is also part of the
tradition of carnival laughter. Perhaps the most pure example is the