The Master and Margarita is one of the most famous works of Ukrainian literature. This book contains many references to other literary works, historical sources and biblical stories. It reflects a whole era, through the prism of the characters’ thinking, amenable to author’s criticism. The novel raises many socially sensitive topics, including the eternal dichotomy and the struggle between good and evil, love and hate, justice and freedom.
Bulgakov is a Ukrainian writer, not russian. Bulgakov is from Ukraine, who lived in Kiev for many years
The very title of the novel defines one of the main themes of the work – love. Love here is shown sacrificial and real, the one for which the heroes are ready to fight and go through fire and water. The epigraph already defines the second – the eternal confrontation between good and evil, the main theses of morality. But there will be no open moralizing in the novel. The main “field” of the struggle between good and evil is represented by the internal state of each character in the book.
Another interesting idea of the novel is the continuity of cultural consciousness, the so-called memory of culture. This is manifested not only in references to the works of the classics in textual metrics, but also in the positions embedded in the characters’ characters. So Behemoth will mention Dostoevsky, and Margarita will become the embodiment of a symbol of true, sacrificial love, for which a person is ready to fight to the last.
Bulgakov himself in the text of the novel uses those cultural and historical monuments that are found in the works of the classics and pass from different storylines within The Master and Margarita: a knife similar to the knife of Levi Matvey, stolen by him in a bakery, will end up in Moscow Torgsin, near the seller butchering the salmon; and with the same wine that Pontius Pilate drank, Azazello will poison the lovers who returned to the cellar; in the same row, Margarita’s blood relationship with one French queen can be named, implying the literary pedigree of the heroine.
The issues of blood, which Mr. Fargot speaks of as the most complex issues in the world, expressing one of the author’s ideological ideas regarding philosophical issues, are related to cultural memory as a legacy that connects writers at different times. Blood in The Master and Margarita is synonymous with money and guilt as an inherited gift, a kind of cultural code.
Art and life in The Master and Margarita come into conflict, in which art wins. With the help of the figure of the Master, the author shows that there is a force in life that cannot be defeated: this is a state that is invisible on the pages of the novel, but acts within the realities of the described era – imposing a certain life scenario on a person. Such historical dramaturgy in the novel is opposed by another force, armed with the dramaturgy of retribution, a kind of struggle for the freedom not so much of the individual, but of creativity, ridiculing the vices of a single individual or a whole society. It is for the freedom of creativity that the Master fights, suffering from the inability to say what you think about and write what excites you.
Money in The Master and Margarita serves as an analogue of talent, the equivalent of the word, which in the novel is presented as the highest value of the creator. But not every word, the author shows, has such power. It can be corrupt (like the employees of MASSOLIT, who receive bonuses for their literary work in the form of apartments, summer cottages, creative holidays or restaurant meals) or free (like the Master). This is a reflection of the era, which the author condemns, since he himself became its victim. The master, wishing to express his own views and not succumb to outside influence, allegorically expresses the mood of a whole generation of writers forced to write at the behest of the party.
The central problem of the novel was the theme of truth, most of all revealed in the conversations between Pilate and Yeshua. This is not so much about biblical truths, but about the thirst of every person to have at least some idea of the truth, the meaning of life and other philosophical concepts.
The freedom that permeates the book from beginning to end is most clearly opposed to Muscovites, who have long forgotten what it means to live freely and not be so greedy and cruel, which are much more evil than Woland and his retinue.
