The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)

The aftermath of Stalin's regime left a trail of destruction in its wake, both structurally and psychologically; although Bulgakov finished writing The Master and Margarita in the 1940's it wasn't officially published until the 1960's when The Era of Stagnation under Brezhnev was just beginning, creating an atmosphere of vapidity that made an interesting counterpoint to Bulgakov's novel. Under Stalin, Russian life was filled with a grim sense of helplessness and unpredictability, friends and family were encouraged to report unpatriotic behavior on their loved ones, neighbors would accuse neighbors of anything simply to be able to take over another room and expand their apartments;  the climate under Stalin was filled with suspicion and dread. At any moment a loved one could disappear into the Gulag Archipelago, perhaps never to be seen or heard from again. 

In 1946, the Soviet Union passed the Zhdanov Doctrine, dividing the world into two camps, that of the imperialistic world headed by the United States, and the democratic, headed by the Soviet Union. The main principle of the Zhdanov Doctrine was summarized by the phrase "The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best." Meaning, that for Soviet artists and writers and the intelligentsia they could either conform to the party line or they would suffer the repercussions...

The Master and Margarita follows three interwoven narratives. The first being that Professor Woland (i.e. Satan) and his retinue and the havoc they reek on Moscow. It is a satire of the demonic vs. the literary powers and the imposed normalcy of Soviet life under the Great Terror of the 1930's. The professor is introduced interrupting a discussion between a poet and an editor that work for a Soviet anti-religious propaganda magazine, they are disputing the existence of Christ. Woland, who saunters up holding a cane with the head of a poodle, (one of the many references to Faust's Mephistopheles) after a few pleasantries begins to dismantle their arguments against the plausibility of the Christ story and the existence of God. As a representative of the "other world" Woland argues that God must exist, without heaven there can be no hell, or rather God exists because the evidence of Satan is inarguable. He then begins his foray into Muscovite life, upending the predictable and followed by a posse of buffoons reeking havoc and disorder on all they come into contact with, specifically the literati.

One of Woland's arguments for the Christ story, is that he was there, so therefor it must have happened; an argument that tends to confirm the suspicion of his insanity rather than the veracity of his theory. He then begins a narration about Pontius Pilate, thus introducing us to the second narrative. The Pontius Pilate narrative hinges on one of Bulgakov's aphorisms, "Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.." Arguing that it was simply cowardice that caused Pilate to agree to the death sentence for Yeshua,  who seemed little more than a pacifistic philosopher. Although neither Stalin or Caesar make appearances in the narrative in person, they are omnipresent in their imposed inarguable will that has become the measure of morality and the construct of reality. During his brief encounter with Yeshua, Pilate becomes certain that this man, while perhaps possessing some supernatural power, is not harmful in the slightest. But when Yeshua says something that does not conform to the party line :

"Among other things", the prisoner recounted, "I said that all authority is violence over people, and that a time will come when there will be no authority of the Caesars, nor any other authority. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice, where generally there will be no need for any authority."

Pilate, after hearing this blasphemy against party doctrine, has no choice but to hand Yeshua over to be murdered, while a murderer, Barabbas, is released to go free. Apparently murder is less of a threat than controversial philosophies. After Yeshua is led away to be crucified, Pilate is overcome with the shame of his cowardice. He must then spend two thousand years in limbo reliving his shame and muttering the same mantra under his breath over and over again.

"He says that even the moon gives him no peace, and that his is a bad job. That is what he always says when he is not asleep, and when he sleeps he dreams one and the same thing: there is a path of moonlight, and he wants to walk down it and talk with the prisoner Ha-Nozri, because, as he insists, he never finished what he was saying that time, long ago, on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan. But alas, for some reason he never manages to get on to this path, and no one ever comes to him. Then there's no help for it, he must talk to himself."

The third narrative is about the writer, representing the intelligentsia, responsible for writing truth and upholding the triumph of poetry, imagination and the free world over the terror of oppression. This writer, the master, has been struggling with a manuscript about Pontius Pilate for years, he has begun over and over and has finally been driven to madness, leaving all he has behind him, including the beautiful Margarita, his helpmate and companion. He has checked himself into an asylum, where he waits for the confidence to challenge the rule of terror that has strangled the artists and writers around him, he waits in limbo for his salvation.

The characters of the Master and Margarita are based on Bulgakov and his second wife, Elena Sergeevna, who like Margarita, was married to a high ranking official. Elena and Margarita encourage the writers to survive, they believe in them and in the importance of their work. While the master is hidden away in the asylum, Margarita makes a bargain with Satan in order to find the master and restore him to his little basement where they have spent many countless hours together working on their manuscript,  for it is as much hers as it is his. Margarita is the true heroine of this book, representing true love and personal courage, willing to defy everything that comes between her and the master, whether it is societal conventions, party politics or the constrictions of reality. She embarks on a journey into the bowels of hell, becomes the Queen of Satan's ball and must give up her identity, as she is stripped of her own being in exchange for the body of a witch, and all this to pursue the master, so that she might help him to finish his story and find rest.

When finally, Woland has agreed to give both the master and Margarita peace, he takes them on a journey where they must first leave all that they are and have behind and that culminates with the meeting of the object of the master's obsession, Pilate.

"The master seemed to have been expecting this, as he stood motionless and looked at the seated procurator  he cupped his hands to his mouth and cried out so that the echo leaped over the unpeopled and unforested mountains: "You're free! You're free! He's waiting for you!"

Releasing Pilate from his two thousand years in limbo to finally finish his discussion with the philosopher, while simultaneously discovering peace for himself in limbo where the artist will finally be free, surrounded by the stillness and peace not granted to him in life.

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-)

The book opens with this line:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

And a family tree on the other side of the page, a foreboding and tangled lineage that I went back to over and over again until I gave up, threw in the towel and realized the specific characters are secondary to the plot.

At once the reader is pulled into another universe of magical realism, where women disappear into the heavens wrapped in bed sheets. I was immediately drawn into this world, where in an attempt to find a new world and leave their past behind them, Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula, leave everything they have ever know to travel through virgin territory and finally after having a vision of a city of mirrors that would reflect the world in and about it, they found Macando at the riverside of a wandering jungle.

The narrative constantly shifts from past to present and as more and more generations are introduced all with confusing matrilineage I began to feel like I was reading something better written but slightly less interesting then a genealogy record. Magical realism sometimes makes me uncomfortable, nothing is stable or predictable and like a Murakami novel fish could start raining from the sky at any moment. As a reader this requires a lot of trust, and after 200 pages or so I stopped fighting it and let the world of Macando sweep me into its reality. By the last 50 pages I couldn't put it down and was hoping it would never end. I wanted to crawl into Macando and never leave, walk down its muddy streets and go door to door with Arcadio soliciting raffle tickets for broken hopes and impossible dreams.

The basic summation of the plot is that the same people are born over and over again as the family slowly  devolves and what is left of their hopes and dreams lies shriveled and naked and slowly carried away by a procession of ants...

While the family struggles to keep up appearances, generations have passed and the family lacks the grandeur it once possessed.

"Sitting at the head of the table, drinking a chicken broth that landed in her stomach like an elixir of  resurrection, Meme then saw Fernanda and Amaranta wrapped in an accusatory halo of reality. She had to make a great effort not to throw at them their prissiness, their poverty of spirit, their delusions of grandeur."

Each family member embarks on their own solitary crusade, whether it is the constant fight to keep the weeds from devouring the house and the ants from tearing down the foundation of their lives, or a hopeless political battle between the liberals and conservatives who no longer remember why they're fighting, or a special smoldering hatred for one and love for another, the characters pick up their crosses and fight their battles alone.

"At times it pained her to have an outpouring of misery follow its course, and at times it would make her so angry that she would prick her fingers with the needles, but what pained her most and enraged her most and made her the most bitter was the fragrant and wormy guava grove of love that was dragging her toward death....

...The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it had still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light and evoke without trembling Pietro Crespi's smell of lavender at dusk and rescue Rebeca from her slough of misery, not out of hatred or love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude."

While each generation attempts to conquer their own individual ineffectual demons, they are overwhelmed with the isolation of their crusades and confronted with the futile lack of progress. When the family finally produces a bastard they are ashamed of (vs. all the other children in the family with a less then glamorous pedigree) they lock Aureliano Babilonia in the room filled with cryptic parchments and he spends his life slowly attempting to decipher them only to finally realize they are a prophetic history of every moment his family has ever lived and will live. Their lives have been written from the beginning only to end in a crumbling destruction, abandoned by fate.

"What did you expect?" he murmured. "Time passes."
"That's how it goes," Ursula said, "but not so much."
When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she admitted, but that it was turning in a circle."

The Viconian theory of cyclic history consists of three recurring phases, a primitive phase of society embedded with the Divine or mythic, a phase of political conflict and finally an egalitarian phase where rank and privilege have been dismantled by the previous conflicts. Marquez creates a world where history is repetitive in a similar fashion. The family starts out with little besides the clothes on their backs as they forage through the jungle, intent on making a new life for themselves. As generations pass the family becomes embroiled in the politics not only of Macando but in the regions surrounding them, forcing a peaceful, idyllic town into the demands of modernity and finally when the dust settles, the town no longer remembers the founders existence, they themselves have become the myth. The moment when Aureliano Babilonia realizes that not only is history repetitive but also predetermined is the moment the Buendia family history comes to an end.

"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave the room, for it was already foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages)  would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men...everything written on the parchments was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."