The pantry was cool and smelled of mice and boots.
The monthly magazine Moskva, otherwise a rather cautious and quiet publication, carried the first part of The Master and Margarita in its November 1966 issue.
There isn’t a single eastern religion,” said Berlioz, “in which, as a rule, a chaste virgin doesn’t give birth to a god. And without inventing anything new, in exactly the same way, the Christians created their Jesus, who in reality never actually lived. And it’s on that the main emphasis needs to be put...
The White Guard, written in the twenties and dealing with the nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of war in all of literature.
One is the much-quoted ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion.
Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928.
She gave a little jump and hung in the air a little way above the rug, then she slowly began to be drawn downwards and dropped...
These words, which do not appear in the definitive text, tell us how painfully Bulgakov weighed the question of cowardice and guilt in considering the fate of his hero, and how we should understand the ending of the final.
He’s already the devil knows where!
Bulgakov’s gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.
A morphine addict has one piece of good fortune, which nobody can take away from him – the capacity to spend his life in total solitude. And solitude means important, significant ideas, it means contemplation, tranquillity, wisdom...
I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp for breath, as though a red-hot crowbar were being thrust into my stomach and rotated. Four minutes after the injection I was able to distinguish the wave-like nature of the pain.
Do you know with whom you are presently speaking?’ Woland asked the visitor. Whose guest are you? ‘I do,’ replied the master, ‘my neighbour in the madhouse was that boy, Ivan Homeless. He told me about you.’ ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ Woland responded, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch’s Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don’t exist. But you do believe that it is really I?
What you say is true,’ the master observed, struck by the neatness of Koroviev’s work, ’that if there are no papers, there’s no person. I have no papers, so there’s precisely no me.
Soon the room had that desolate look that comes from the chaos of packing up to go away and, worse, from removing the shade from the lamp. Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred. Scuttle away like a rat from danger and into the unknown. Read or doze beside your lampshade; let the storm howl outside and wait until they come for you.
He’s clever,” thought Ivan. “You have to admit, there are some smart people even among the intelligentsia. No denying that!
But I judge by the eyes – you can’t mistake them either near or far! Oh, eyes are a significant thing! Like a barometer. You can see everything – who has a vast desert in his heart, who can jab you in the ribs with the toe of his boot for no reason at all, and who is afraid of everything.
It is interesting to note that Margarita’s soul was in perfect shape.
Oh, thrice romantic Master, don’t you want to stroll with your beloved by day under the cherries bursting into bloom, and int he evenings listen to Schubert’s music? Won’t it be pleasant for you to write with a quill by candlelight? Don’t you want to sit, like Faust, over a retort, hoping to create a new homunculus?
L’amour surgit devant nous comme surgit de terre l’assassin au coin d’une ruelle obscure, et nous frappa tous deux d’un coup. Ainsi frappe la foudre, ainsi frappe le poignard !