The Master And Margarita

The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov This is a romance, but it is a very special one. There are books for which it is difficult to comment in terms of objective quality because we were involved in a way that leaves little room for our analytical eye. This is one of them, a book that have struck me in such a way that the only thing that can be said of it is the identity between me and that book, one belonging to each other: a book that is a windows on the soul, which has become part of my personal mythology. The fantasy, poetry, irony, the Bulgakov's vision can not be easily commented, it is a text that I kept on reading with the inevitability of fate. The book takes place at two different levels: in the city of Moscow, where lives the unhappy love of the Master and Margarita, and in which the devil makes its apparition with his servants, disrupting the miserable life of the hypocrites and the opportunists. The second level is the novel written by the Master about the passion of Jesus, a novel within the main novel, in a sort of "mise en abyme", with a special emphasis on the relationship between Jesus and Pilate and their confrontation. Among the infinite qualities of the text are the beauty of his descriptions: a memorable Sabbath and the feast of the great dance hosted by Satan; the melancholy of a midnight ride; the eschatological revelations in the clear light of the moon. I have been deeply impressed by two things: the relationship between the seemingly naive, simple and vulnerable man Yeshua and the power of Pontius Pilate, efficient official of a relentless power machine of which are portrayed in a wonderful way both the appearances and the hidden movements, a machine to which the same Pontius Pilate is enslaved to the point of having to give up the fruits of his extraordinary metaphysical intuition. The ways in which this bond between the two characters is created is perhaps where the mystery is more tangible and engaging, being the very heart of the enigma; the context that is the background to this relationship is defined by both a properly spiritual dimension and a deeply human dimension, psychologically true. Finally, the fact that the novel has been found true at the higher degrees of judgment is a statement about literature, its status, its essence, that can give us a sense of what was his profound meaning and its function in Russia. It is a unique text that merges the deep imagination of the western culture, the concrete historical reality and a timeless spiritual world relived with participation, affirming the strength of the intuition and the role of the literature as witness and teacher.

-- Daniele Radogna