Sunday 14 March 2010

"Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!"

While writing about socialist realism in Hungary, I somehow ended up discussing Mikhail Bulgakov, one of my absolute favourite writers and whose name always comes up whenever Stalin is concerned.
His masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, is just that, a masterpiece. A parody of the Soviet society where Stalin is the Devil, Bulgakov's third wife is the bewitching Margarita, and Bulgakov himself is represented by the Artist. Nothing is what it seems and Moscow is turned upside down.
Another interesting read by Bulgakov is the novella The Fatal Eggs. The book can be classified as a laugh-out-loud-satire of the 1917 revolution and the new Soviet society that followed it.

"But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."

Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I want to think that a world can exist without evil! The first evil that I would like to see disappear is the evil of drug addiction and alcoholism.

Secretia