Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-m42fx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-24T13:37:34.727Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Master and Margarita: The Reach Exceeds the Grasp

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Joan Delaney
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works. On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers found the book extremely attractive on various levels, yet felt, along with the novel's British translator, Michael Glenny, that the keystone had just missed being slipped into place.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 89 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1972

References

1. Moskva, November 1966 and January 1967. The Master and Margarita, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Grove Press, 1967); trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

2. “Mikhail Bulgakov,” Survey, no. 65 (October 1967), pp. 3-14.

3. “Foreword,” book 1, Master i Margarita, in Moskva, November 1966, pp. 6-7.

4. One rather obscure but interesting example—no doubt known to Bulgakov—was a fantastic story by Veniamin Kaverin, “Engineer Schwarz,” in which a mysterious German mathematician is imported to help make the results of the Revolution more “congruent.” Perhaps significantly, the story is contained in a collection of Kaverin’s early pieces entitled Mastera i podmaster'ia ﹛Masters and Apprentices) (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923).

5. The passage is found on pages 123-24 of the Michael Glenny translation in the Signet paperback edition. Further page references are to that edition. Master i Margarita (Frankfurt, 1969) also contains the passages not found in Moskva. The YMCA Press Russian editions are printed from the Moskva text.

6. A. Vulis, “Afterword,” Moskva, November 1966, p. 128.

7. Black Snow, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), pp. 27-28.

8. Vulis, “Afterword,” p. 128.