This book reads like Dostoyevsky’s bad dream. It would be inside his mind, and it is constantly unsettling. There are a lot of inconsistencies and ambiguities in this book — some of these consistencies are well-documented by scholars, most of which still struggle to find meaning. It is in some ways an unfinished text, written at cusp of Bulgakov’s life. However, it doesn’t take away the charm of the book.
It is difficult to pinpoint a genre for the Master and Margerita — but don’t worry about that. Suspend what you know about reality for a few days until the end of this book. If you have the annotated edition, the notes are super helpful. Some of the dream sequences are based on real life, which makes it even more surreal — for example, the arrests of citizens who hoarded foreign currency (illegal at the time).
There are more sinister undertones of what was happening in Soviet Russia — xenophobia, constant threat of arrest over nothing, the real estate crunch in the cities which led people to do unspeakable things. But don’t read it just for the study of its context — let your mind drown in Bulgakov’s fantasy.
