The Master and Margarita is of the brand of Russian literature that explains everything about life. Along with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and of few other Eastern Europeans, you can apparently get all you need to know about the world. This book is about the devil, but more so it's really just about good and evil. When I was doing this FYP thing at King's, one of the biggest things that I really got from it was from reading The Confessions by St Augustine and realizing how much of modern Christianity just isn't based on founding principles. The Confessions is a canonical book of Christianity yet it is entirely contradictory with modern beliefs. One of the things I find most interesting, is the idea of a Devil. One of the strongest sentiments in The Confessions and in Dante's Divine Comedy and for that matter, part of The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, was that there is no evil. The Hell is a creation of mankind with the purpose of allaying the consciousness' of humans who don't fully understand God. Now I don't really believe in any of this but it lends itself well to the idea of an attempt at balance instead of a war between good and evil.
The Master and Margarita is a book of fiction and fantasy that takes many ideas that we think of as flightful such as the devil, and interchanges them with ideas that we think of as solid and unquestionable such as reality. The whole book has a very interesting play with metaphor and with the fantastic. I found that this was a great book about not beating you over the head with its morals and yet being able to figure out what the hell the theme of the book is. This being said, I think it would be less enjoyable if the reader hadn't already encountered Geothe's Faust and Marlowe's Dr Faustus (again thank you FYP).
One of the classics and though it is heavy in meaning, it is a quite enjoyable and thoroughly readable without getting a headache. I would advise having a browser open with wikipedia though because some of the Russian terms and the references are hard to catch. Make sure to look up why the devil keeps referring to poodles if you do read the book.
7 cat-demons out of 8
Andrew
No comments:
Post a Comment