Source: Yahoo Reuters News
Written By: Meg Clothier
Decapitation by tram, Christ on the cross and true love in a Moscow basement.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s much-loved and much-quoted novel “The Master and Margarita” has Russians mesmerised in front of their television sets with its mix of deadpan comedy, soaring fantasy, and troubling questions about politics, religion and love.
On Monday night nearly one in two Russians watching television were tuned in to see the cult classic, with that rising to almost 60 percent in Moscow.
“To see it in the cinema, let alone on television, was for several generations of readers a dream that had refused to come true,” wrote the Izvestia daily in an editorial.
The novel was written mainly during the repressive 1930s when people were arbitrarily arrested by Stalin’s secret police as “enemies of the people” but it was not openly published until the 1960s, when Bulgakov was long dead.
Since then it has become the one 20th-century novel that every Russian will have heard of, even if they haven’t read it.
“Nothing like it had been seen before. For us it was completely out of the ordinary, unbelievable,” Vladimir Bortko, who adapted and directed the series, told Reuters, remembering the time when the book first appeared.
As a popular culture event its release as a television series is as exciting for Russians as the screening of “Lord of The Rings” for a western audience. For Russia’s literary tradition, it breathes fresh life into the hallowed space it shares with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
History is littered with big name directors who have floated the idea of a film version of the book. But only a couple of relatively small foreign projects ever got off the ground.
DEVIL IN DISGUISE
It is indeed a treat to watch the devil, in the guise of a dapper foreigner called Woland, arrive in 1930s Moscow and humiliate hypocritical, greedy and arrogant people with power whilst reuniting the noble lovers, Master and Margarita.
The critics, although thrilled that the painfully dubbed Brazilian soaps of the 1990s no longer hold sway in Russian households, had some quibbles.
Woland’s eyes were too kind, some said. His psychopathic sidekick Cat Begemot — Hippopotamus in Russian — looked a bit gawky in his furry suit clambering on and off a tram.
Some even worried that Bortko had clung too closely to the original — but then he would probably have been metaphorically hung, drawn and quartered if he had tampered with the story.
For many people, however, what mattered was that a Russian screen version had finally aired, after a long-held belief that it was impossible to film.
It was not just because the magical mayhem was tough to conjure up without modern special effects but also due to a suspicion that the book was jinxed, the way some in the theater feel about Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”
“The materialist Vladimir Bortko is the valiant man who has removed the curse of ‘unfilmability’, traditionally explained by the interference of supernatural powers,” wrote Kommersant.
The idea of a jinx, said Bortko, was nonsense brewed up by the Russian psyche.
“The Englishman can say what he’s going to do in five years. But as for what will happen to us in two months, who knows? Revolution, default, something else. It leads to mysticism.”
DREAMS OF FREEDOM
Fun and funny though it is, the dread of the authorities in “The Master and Margarita” is never far away. The Master sits with a bloodstained lip in his room while uniformed men rifle through his papers before carting the — all too sane — writer off to a mental asylum.
Bulgakov also retells the biblical story of the death of Jesus, stressing that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate failed to save him — more evidence of human frailty and compromise.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta said the book helped Russians 40 years ago feel that inside themselves they could be free from social and political power.
Now that statues of Stalin are museum pieces and Russians are free to eat McDonald’s, holiday in Spain and complain about their leaders, do Russians still need the book’s dreams of freedom?
Nezavisimaya Gazeta said yes.
“Has Russian dependence on the authorities, on the words, gestures, moods of the Caesar lessened? No. It has just taken another, more liberal, form,” the newspaper said.
The series is set to run up until December 30. As Izvestia wrote on its op-ed page: “We’ll keep watching.”
