Experimental Blog #80

Comments on "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

To an American outsider in the early 21st century this book seems to be bristling with jabs at communist party programs in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union, stereotypical communist party personalities, and Joseph Stalin in particular.
It also seems that Mikhail Bulgakov actually fought against the communists in the Russian civil war, and, subsequently, his work was so severely attacked by Bulgakov's communist literay contemporaries that his output must have been significantly curtailed.

Mikhail Bulgakov's Moscow apartment was searched several times by the secret police, and they must have known about his unpublished manuscripts, but he was never arrested. Perhaps it was because this book, at least, was too fantastical and bizarre and, maybe, too obscure.

Joseph Stalin, who was not Bulgakov's severest critic, actually telephoned Mikhail Bulgakov at least twice, in 1930 and 1937; and the first time he helped him to find work.
"Master and Margarita" ends in a time of such a violent approaching storm, this seems to have been written around 1940 when Mikhail Bulgakov died, that the book seems very prophetic.