Michail Afanas'evic Bulgakov
Il Maestro e Margherita

Published (quite a bit) posthumously in 1966-67, "The Master and Margarita" is the final destination of Michail Afanas'evic Bulgakov, after a life spent wrestling with (great) theater, various novels, and satirical stories. What is generally called the masterpiece.

The relationship between Bulgakov and the Soviet regime was never particularly pleasant, nor was his personal relationship with the era and place in which he lived - certainly not the ideal environment for the expressive freedom he felt he could not live without. However, whether it was due to the initial appreciation of "The White Guard" by Josif Stalin, who then remained rather "distracted" towards him, or because Bulgakov's opposition to the regime was more individualistic - and partly resigned - than anything else (despite the sharp revenges scattered and camouflaged in his poetics), he somehow managed to write it, the blessed masterpiece (which, like every other of his works, didn't have an easy life editorially speaking; nearly thirty years had to pass from his death to see it published). And thankfully, he did, I'd say.
Because it truly is a masterpiece: a literary polyphony, a small modern mythology that manages to filter through irony the beauty of classics by rinsing away all their weightiness. And it is also a very peculiar novel, intertwining satire, symbolism, philosophy, and a thousand other things into a story that is at times bewildering (but not confused), yet highly readable.

In short: the devil arrives in Moscow, just like that. But the deaf and dogmatic rationalism of two distinguished members of the Soviet cultural elite does not allow them to recognize him, even though he lucidly claims to have had breakfast with Kant and to have merrily visited Pontius Pilate not too long ago. The consequence of such stupidity is a nasty incident involving a beheading, which is the beginning of a whole potpourri of grotesque and astonishing events (all because Annuska spilled the sunflower oil, for heaven's sake). Objects disappear or reappear where they shouldn't, a tousled theater director is teleported to Yalta, mediocre poets go mad and wander around Moscow in their underwear chasing hallucinations, playing cards transform into rubles, rubles transform into dollars, officials disappear leaving only their jacket (which continues to carry out their work). And a distinguished black cat named Hippopotamus (or Behemoth, if you prefer). All devices with which good Michail Afanas'evic makes loud yet subtle mockeries of the futility of life around him, the housing crisis, the pragmatic Soviet system that he couldn't bear and that leaves no room for fanciful flights, the regime's intellectuals and their ilk.

Meanwhile (indeed, in another time and another dimension) Pilate has a headache. An unbearable migraine since they brought that vagabond, Ha-Nozri, before him... He had no choice, he had to have him executed. Yet there was something else he had to finish saying to him, an unfinished conversation, before sending him to the cross. And the moon floods the hated palace of Herod, then it's day again, while in Yerusolaim events unfold rapidly, and Pilate already knows he won't be able to save Judas of Kerioth from his fate. But already we're back in Moscow in the '30s, and the two cities strangely seem to overlap...

But the story of Pilate remains there, suspended. Its author, the Master, never resumed it from that autumn night when, frustrated by bureaucratic coldness, he burned it (although, in the devil's words, novels don't really burn) and ended up in a psychiatric clinic. The Master, called so without having published anything, only because of that novel about Pilate. And only by her, Margarita, whom he must find before resuming the story. Along with a disciple who can finish it. (And it's quite true that without important connections - like Satan - you can't publish anything...)

Let's recombine it all, rewriting it with sometimes descriptive or poetic tones, other times paradoxical and grotesque, with a mystical aftertaste, interspersed with delightful bursts of irony. What emerges is an original parable on modern times, and more universally on good and evil, as well as an apology of the irrational and fantasy. Because, Bulgakov warns, the artist cannot sit there, attentive to bureaucratic norms and party directives, forced to repeat the lesson of the spirit of the times. Rather, it's better to fly away at night on impalpable horses alongside the devil, Margarita, Korov'ev, Azazel, and a cat named Hippopotamus (or Behemoth, depending).

And now I don't know whether having read it in a high-risk-of-falling-apart edition (a risk that increases, moreover, with the years), dating back to the middle Eocene and with all the commas placed randomly - although aesthetically very fascinating - has overall been a good or bad thing, but besides all else, it is indeed a good book.