A Son of the Rock

Penguin Red Classics, 2006, 563p. Translated from the Russian, Master i Margarita, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997.

The Master and Margarita displays its oddness from the start. A stranger appears to two men in the Moscow district of Patriarch’s Ponds and makes predictions of weird events – including the death of one of the pair. These predictions, of course, come true; and in short order. For the stranger – accompanied by someone who appears as a large black cat – is the Devil. Thereafter we are treated to all sorts of wonderful happenings: instant transition to Yalta, various illusions disguised as fantastic stage tricks, flying witches, a man transformed into a donkey, a party at the Devil’s house.

The Master of the title is a would-be author whose novel about Pontius Pilate has been roundly trashed in the press (despite it not having been published.) Margarita – married to a man she does not love – is the Master’s mistress, resentful of the effect the novel’s reception has had on him and of those who caused it. Extracts from this novel (an account of the torment Pontius Pilate undergoes as he is forced to condemn one Yoshua Ha-Nozri – who avers that all men are good – for comments about Cæsar) are intermittently included in the larger narrative. This is an excellent piece of writing in its own right, especially the descriptions of Yershalaim (Jerusalem.) Other recognisable names here include the priest Kaifa and one Judas of Kiriath. This internal novel (whose manuscript has been burned by the master) is apparently responsible for the Russian phrase “manuscripts don’t burn” – as the Devil tells the master in the main narrative when returning it to him – but its contents intrude into the main body only twice, when Matthew Levi, Ha-Nozri’s sole follower, pops up in modern Moscow and when Pilate is finally reconciled.

Reflecting the Stalinist era in which The Master and Margarita is set there is much talk of possible arrests (some of them for foreign currency violations, though, which could be irregular in any polity) but the apprehension of the police and the necessity for secrecy are never far away.

Any work of fiction is an attempt to describe circumstances to which the reader has no other access but whether the full flavour of a novel such as The Master and Margarita is ever captured by any translation is problematic. The cultural assumptions under which it was written are always different to those of the reader. In the end, for me, the characters lacked sufficient agency as the fantastical elements of the book overpowered all the others. As a metaphor for lack of political and judicial accountability, though, violation of cause and effect is fair enough.