Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

This was my second read through of this book and I was surprised how much I didn't remember how fun it is. It realizes all of what you could imagine from hearing the canned description "the devil comes to 1930's Moscow", while having a beautiful structure and being understatedly tragic, yet also delivering some morning-grey colored hope. The whole thing is magic trick like in the way that it breezes through episodes of the devil's crew's mischief intercut with the slow telling of the story of Pontius Pilate, switching more than half-way through to the eponymous protagonists, and then tieing what felt like discrete episodes into a tightly woven whole.

The book is packed, like a Soviet communal apartment, full of themes, but I wasn't really aware of them as I was reading. They've dawned on me between and after I finished reading and that's because the story is told stupid simply. The plot is stuff happening, which causes other stuff to happen; call me old-fashioned, but I think that's a pretty neat way to tell a story. The first half of the book is a cycle of: devil (or crew) interacts with some Muscovites, we see the consequences of the actions (which are funny), and these consequences lead to the next interaction between the devil (and crew) with other folks. Even the sections about Pilate are framed diagetically, first being told by the devil then being dreamed by someone then having been written by someone. The themes arise from this simple structure so breezily, and the events flow so naturally from each other, that they seem almost incidental. They're not, and that's why its a good book.

Surprisingly for a book featuring the devil and Pontius Pilate, religion isn't really a theme (unless you call considerations of the internal states of individuals and people religion, and if so, buddy I know some priests who would disagree), although obviously the Christian canon is used as a set of pastels. The book hates on Moscow specifically, but cities in general. The devil and company act like super unethical sociologists, going around and conducting experiments ranging from predicting someone's immenint death to them, to giving out money that turns into slips of paper after a few hours, to taking a guy's head off and putting it back on. An individual's reaction to these stunts is a kind of signifier for their inner state; by the end of the story the local psychiatric hospital is chock full of people who have interacted with the devil's band, while the protagonists are almost cleansed by these interactions. Mental illness is another theme. An inversion takes place over the course of the story, with the "master" starting out in the psychiatric hospital, driven insane by routine yet dehumanizing interaction with normative society, and improving as the normative society is dissected by the events of the plot.

This friction between society and individuals, and a given individual's inclination to sacrifice the sanctity of their inner state for outward security, is the heart of the tragedy of the novel. This is underlined by the Yershalam parts of the novel: Pilate sentences Yeshua only because he knows it is expected and any other outcome would ruin him, but by doing this Pilate damns himself to torment. Notably, the torment is coming from within and this is mirrored by the master's madness and Margarita's self-isolation. The morsel of hope that the novel delivers is in Yeshua - who, more than being a Jesus figure, is an individual who does not allow the outward world to dictate their actions - forgiving Pilate and the master's words freeing him from his moon-tormented stasis. In other words, the hope that we as individual's have for freedom and inner determination lies in our own and others' bravery. The master and Margarita are free because of Margarita's bravery, Pilate because of Yeshua's.

That's just one facet of the novel. There are loads more, some resonate with each other and some are relatively out of left field. Everything meshes so well together and feels so natural, despite the heaviness and absurdity of the book, because of the pacing and commitment to telling the story as a sequence of events that happens in one place over a short span of time to distinct individuals. Like the best dishes, its simple, local, honest, and rustic.

A lot of commentary on the book likes to point out how much and subtlely Bulgakov mentions the secret police and disappearances as a normal part of Soviet life. These mentions are interesting and fit really well with the overarching idea of society bending individuals into a certain moral shape, but I think people blow this aspect of the book out of proportion as a way of feeding into the idea that this was an anti-Stalinist, state-censored work. It is a work of genius that didn't see the light of day for a long time after the author's death, and it would have been censored if Bulgakov was silly enough to try to get it published, but the delay in publishing was partly up to his friends' advice and his death not long after he finished it. It was interesting to read that Bulgakov was one of Stalin's favorite playwrights and Stalin personally comminucated with him at least once. (Not to put too fine a point on it. Bulgakov's biography is incredible and he continually pushed up to the line of what was acceptable in the time and place he lived.)