Appreciating Mikhail Bulgakov the way I Appreciate Gabo

Years ago I offered a course on One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The experience taught me that it is not a good idea to teach one’s literary hero. Not when he writes magic realism, and a reader must enter an extraordinary world and be a wide-open traveler… not a cruise-happy tourist who prefers commercial fiction and happy endings. That’s not fair in that I, the instructor, was not sure how to “teach” Gabo’s wondrous novel, given it must be experienced emotionally and not as a frog in a bottle, as Flannery O’Connor quipped to a professor of English. She meant that literary analysis with its dissection can keep a story or novel from continuing to affect a reader through its created mystery.

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is a novel that reminded me of Gabo’s magic realism. Or should I say Gabo’s novel reminded me of the Russian writer who preceded him. Bulgakov set his fantastical and satiric novel in a real place: Moscow in the 1930s, under Stalin’s brutal dictatorship and his ruthless censorship of artists. The Master and Margarita is a marvel of invention, with characters you have to read about to believe, and then climb in a time capsule and visit Pontius Pilate and Yeshua in Jerusalem. Two parts and two settings are in this novel of magic realism.

I loaned The Master and Margarita to someone and it was not returned. I have nothing intelligent to say about the novel because I read it once in a state of wonder. Now I feel the need to read The Master and Margarita again, after reading Bulgakov’s earlier novel, The White Guard.

The last few days I’ve watched the 2012 production of this Bulgakov novel, shown on Russian television. The eight episodes of The White Guard can be seen through Amazon Prime for $5.99. 

Even if you never read the novel, this series is worth seeing. It is set in Kiev in 1918. Bulgakov was there and lived through the war depicted in the novel. For me, seeing The White Guard made the past four years and the images we’ve all seen from Ukraine even more troubling.

“Are you surprised that people still can dance and sing in a world on its head?”  The question comes from the poet Dylan Thomas in a book I pulled from my library just now.  

To be continued…