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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terror, secrets, foreigners, jesus, death and manuscripts, 2 Aug 2001
By A Customer
Stalin's hierarchical, monolithic political structures of the 1930's intensified the struggle against "enemies of the people" by arresting and executing over 15 million Russians, amongst them managers, intelligentsia and writers. The Secret Police orchestrated State terror by raiding the houses of intellectuals at night if they were suspected of satirising the Soviet state. Bulgakov himself slept with a suitcase full of warm clothes beneath his bed, should the knock at the door at dawn be the KGB. If caught with the manuscript of The Master and Margarita, he would have been sent without trial to the prison camps of Siberia, where he would have been worked through exhaustion into death. An appreciation of the harsh ideological backdrop to this vital and extraordinary novel makes its vision all the more astonishing. Bulgakov examines with a breathtaking wit such subversive issues as institutionalised atheism, Satan's sypmpathetic aspect, the similarities between the political and social systems of Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem and Stalin's Moscow, the arbitrariness of justice, the redemptive power of love (in this case adulterous), and the human effort towards regeneration through compassion and truth. In his generous yet clearly defined system of justice cowards are humiliated, guilty as they are of the worst sin, and the fearless are rewarded with a thin beam of moonlight, to freedom and salvation. The Master and Magarita is as great a text as any I have ever read; Bulgakov's prodigious verbal gift is equal to Joyce or even Shakespeare, and as such deserves a special, exalted place at the pinnacle of World literature.
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