Customer Reviews

The Master and Margarita (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)

5 star:		(66)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I've always been a fan of Russian novels, ever since I read my first Dostoevsky novel at the age of 10...(okay, it was a Classics Illustrated comic book version of Crime and Punishment!)but had never run across anything by Bulgakov until a few years ago. A Russian friend of mine really pressed me to read the book. I bought it, but it just stayed on the shelf until a few weeks ago. All I can say is, I didn't know what I was missing. Master and Margarita is a wickedly funny, sad, frightening, and ultimately haunting masterpiece of fiction.

Bulgakov was one of the first generation of Soviet writers who flourished in the 20s, during the short lived Soviet Experimental movement, and then suffered horribly after the stregnthening of Stalin's regime. Bugakov was primarily a man of the Theater, and something of a theatrical quality hangs on to this book. The chapters have an almost tableaux style construction. When the Stalinist purges began, Bulgakov was began work on Master and Margarita, pretty much to please himself. He knew that he would never live to see it published.

The novel itself is nearly impossible to describe. It consists of three separate plots. On the surface is the visit to Moscow, of the Devil in the guise of a professor named Woland, and his henchmen, two grotesque disfigured men, a naked woman and a cat who plays chess among other things. The group proceeds to essentially terrorize the city's intellectual community, mostly by exposing each character's inner hypocracy. The satire of communist society in this section is quite biting, and uproariously funny. Embedded in this story is a "novel within a novel" ...the story of Pontius Pilate and his encounter with the itinerant spiritual man, Yeshua. Finally, there is the story of the separated lovers, the Master and Margarita, who interweave between the other two stories. They live in the present day Moscow, but the Master ostensibly wrote the manuscript which told the story of Pontius Pilate.

This rich and complicated stew of a book works on so many different levels. At it's most obvious, it is a scathing attack on communism and the cultural elite's complicity with the evils of the system. It is also rather pitiless in it's exposure of the greed, corruption and mendacity of human nature. But Bulgakov is not a conventional moralist. The Devil as Woland is an evil figure...sometimes a terrifying figure, and yet he ends up as the instrument of the redemption of both the Master and Margarita. There is a deep spiritual viewpoint at work here...Early in the novel, Yeshua tells Pilate that, "all men are good", to Pilate's incredulity. In the context of the novel, Yeshua seems hopelessly naive, but by the end of the novel, you wonder if this may actually not be the author's central point. Even the devil is capable of some good here.

This book contains a whole world. Characters change in dizzying fasion and events go by with lightening speed. And yet, by the last pages there is a haunting beauty, an almost incandescent light that shines over the prose. Some of these final images stay etched in my brain even now, several weeks after finishing.

I highly recommend that anyone read this book. It may be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It certainly is the greatest Russian novel of the last 100 years!

This review does not refer to Master and Margarita, which is a powerful and genius work of art. This review, instead, refers to the Classics House translation of a powerful and genius work of art.

I will sum it up like this: I came across the phrase 'bum-freezer made of air' on the second page of the Classics House translation. I am fluent in Russian and have many Russian friends, and I asked one of them for their Russian copy of Master and Margarita, so what in the world the translator was intending to convey. In short, they had translated 'vasdooshnei pidjakot' (which means an airy or diaphanous jacket) as 'bum-freezer made of air'. Good job, translators!

Throughout the text, I found extremely strange phrases and sentence constructions that were clearly the result of some of the shoddiest translation I have ever seen. What more, the typeset of this book was chock-full of typos and mistakes - I have counted seventeen on the page I am looking at right now. When reading a novel, it is not fun to be constantly jolted out of the reading experience by noticing all the strange typesetting mistakes and constant strange phrases that make me wonder what word the translator bungled this time. And I really do not recommend this edition to anyone who is not reading it for the laughs.

The Master and Margarita is a wonderful book, a masterpiece, but this version is so flawed that it's hard to see the jewel underneath.
I bought this copy because I'd lost my last, almost worn out paperback. It is so full of typographical errors that it is nearly unreadable. Spelling mistakes, no spaces after punctuation, too many spaces after punctuation, odd use of conventions (quotation marks, colons, etc) make this apparently slickly produced book (nice cover photo, by the way) appear to be the work of a first year keyboarding student without any proofreading abilities.
The errors are so numerous (many per EVERY paragraph) and so distracting that I am unsure whether I can finish the book before I chuck it in the recycling bin. I hope I can give it zero stars. If I have to select "one star," believe me, it doesn't deserve it.

I would be careful purchasing this edition of The Master and Margarita. The lack of a translator was apparent with misspelled words (haze, spelled ha2e), poor sentence structure (often lacking a verb), and the spacing was not indicative of who was speaking.

I have since gone on and purchased the edition by Picador and find it an entrancing read. I realize now how much I missed out of the first three chapter of the edition I purchased from Amazon by Classic House Publishing.

My Russian husband bought this book for me because he had researched and decided this was the best translation. While this may be the case (I don't know about that), the typos in this book are ridiculous! It is literally hard to get beyond the first chapter because of them. Excerpt complete with typos as seen in the book: "As to his teeth, he haid platinum crowns on his left side and gold ones on his tight. [...] Right eye black, left ieye for some reason green." I admit that I am particularly sensitive to this kind of thing, and I understand one or two errors getting by an editor, but this book is riddled with them and it makes it difficult to read, at least for me since every typo is like a hiccup in the flow of a sentence.

PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS EDITION! IT IS POORLY EDITED AND FULL OF TYPOS AND ERRORS. GET THE PENGUIN EDITION INSTEAD.

I bought this book because I had worn out a previous copy from several re-readings. Needless to say, the book is worth reading, but I strongly suggest obtaining a different edition from this one. The production quality of this book is zero! Multiple typos in just the first 5 pages, a clumsy typeface, sloppy spacing -- obviously somebody just printed out a poorly produced text document that had never been proofread. I have given the book to a resale shop because it was so bad that I couldn't stand to read it.

This book was given to me by a Russian friend who disapproved of my enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky (I never found out why). "The Master and Margarita" is something totally new to me. There is simply nothing like it. It is in turns thought-provoking, horribly frightening, and shatteringly funny. In any case, it is among the most vivid writing I've ever seen. Mind you, this is a translation I read. I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like in Russian!

The Devil comes to Moscow with a strange entourage to do some mischief. Meanwhile, a brilliant writer has been committed to psychiatric hospital after he's written an account of Christ's passion from Pilate's point of view. The reconciliation of these intertwining stories ends up reenacting the drama of Faust's bargain with the hornéd one himself. Maenwhile, there are scenes which must be read to be believed! I particularly loved the description of Rimsky, mad with terror, fleeing the girl vampire. Definitely the wildest book I've ever read.

Do not purchase this book published under ISBN 1442133171. It is a scanned and poorly OCR'd copy of another translation. The bootleggers didn't even proofread this before "publishing" the scanned edition via CreateSpace. So many typos, the letter z is often swapped with the number 2, etc. Don't get me started on punctuation, esp. pertaining to dialogue. DO NOT BUY!

I love Bulgakov. I know the Master and Margarita by heart. And I was dismally disappointed in my anticipations of usual delights interacting with this book. I write interacting, because this book is more then just reading material. But back to the translation. It has missing passages, whole paragraphs, it uses wrong terms and notions. I had to return my copy. I expect to have more luck with RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY translation published in PENGUIN BOOKS 1997, since I pre-viewd it one of the on-line libraries.