The Master and Margarita

⚖The case for it

The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a retinue including Behemoth, an oversized black cat who walks upright, drinks vodka, plays chess, and eventually trades pistol fire with the police. Woland himself is "dark and imposing, but irresistibly charming," which scrambles any expectation about where the menace in this book lives. Margarita's turn is where it stops being difficult and starts being fun: invisible, airborne, settling scores. Satan's ball brings famous dead sinners up out of a fireplace to be received by her as hostess, followed by "the game of chess after Satan's ball." Under the slapstick sits the line the novel is remembered by, that "manuscripts do not burn."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The first hundred and fifty pages test people badly, a crowd of Moscow literary functionaries where "theater people all blurred together" and audiobook listeners fare worse without spelled names in front of them. The Master arrives late and thin, passive beside Margarita, more occasion for her devotion than a man she might plausibly love, so the central romance gets asserted rather than dramatized. The Pilate chapters keep interrupting the Moscow chapters, and readers who came for the devil's rampage resent every cut back to Judea. Without footnotes the Soviet and biblical references pass by untouched. "Long-winded and clunky writing," one reader concludes, filing it as "one of the most overrated books I've read in a while."

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings