GLARING WOR(L)DS

Vicky Slavuski
vslavuski@gmail.com

The Powers of Bulgakov's Prose/ A couple of impressions about The Master and Margarita

How to approach a book-universe ? To open The Master and Margarita is to enter a microcosm which has its own laws, the only way to travel in it is to let go and allow oneself to be dragged down into its ever-changing atmosphere and bubbling, deep waters, dark as lightening. You will not drown, you are offered the pleasure of flying dangerously over abysses but never be swallowed by them. The rigorous structure of the narrative, its multiple threads intertwined in an clockwork manner, support with ease the explosive material and furious freedom. The punching satire, sometimes hyperrealist, others surrealistic, of Soviet bureaucracy, society and literary life and the basso continuo of the narrative on Jesus and Pilate are the exact counterweight which balances the whirling fireworks of scenes which levitate or fly away in a pulsating rhythm as Margarita on her broom.
Which specificity makes the reading of this book an unique experience of continuous surprise and dazzling wonder? The writer as an ultramodern magician, pop illusionist, theater and cabaret director, special effects expert, acrobat between paradise and hell. Writing as torrent, fall, geyser, fire, sickness, infection, delirium, vertigo. The spirit of Haddin Houdini takes the wand and the secret identities of objects and characters is revealed in a polyphony of subversive metaphors. Thousands of minute doors open in the skin of a polyvalent reality overcharged, infected of life-chess pieces become alive, suits write, sparrows dance the foxtrot. The reader is adrift in the hallucinatory reality of Woland and Company and his entertainment park for adults with its deforming mirrors, in the frenetic rhythm of the phantom trains and sliding decks, in permanent metamorphosis. The pleasure of the text, the texture of the pleasure, the love of playing, the playing of love, the search of the continuous surprise, the repetition of never repeating himself. A revelation of the proteic nature of language in perfect symbiosis with the functions of the imagination. All limits are trespassed as this universe-book expands on and on giving a taste of infiniteness. Why this taste? Is it the imposing absence of fear of the author in front of the Unknown which is behind each image, each action, each object? The Unknown as it comes to the foreground at the end of the book?
I find myself at loss to associate The Master and Marguerite to any line in contemporary literature, even though its futurist flair. I find connection to other memories or moments: a friend's tale about an experience with opium, the comics character Mandrake the Magician in its frockcoat with bold Lothar in his kitsch leopard skin, some scenes of burlesque, early animations of Felix the Cat --black and white with hundreds of obsessive felines in a frenzy of big band jazz, some scenes of Fantasy of Walt Disney. But I can see the Master and Marguerite through the looking-glass in Wo(nder)land, escorted by the white rabbit. And in my personal wardrobe of memorable images, Bulgakov's writing-suit hangs next to the smile of the Cheshire Cat.