This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil - to say nothing of his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat, to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev - is very much alive. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a fiercely satirical fantasy that remained unpublished in its author's home country for over thirty years. Perhaps that was never truer than under the regime of the former Soviet Union.” And so it is this timelessly powerful work which he has chosen to adapt for the Cour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace.Paperback. It has to be the function of art to break through that reality. ![]() An imaginative construction, which we take for reality. ![]() As he puts it, “The world we live in is an elaborate fiction. Simon McBurney has always been fascinated by the book, which is at the same time a love story and a political critique, a burlesque comedy and a fantasy tale. The work remained unpublished in its entirety in the Soviet Union until 1973. Anxious to bring his work to perfection, he undertook a third version and then a fourth, which his wife would complete in 1941, a year after her husband's death. After burning the first manuscript of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov returned to the novel in 1931 and completed a second draft in 1936, which contained more or less all the main elements of the final version. Under close surveillance from the Soviet political police, he was nonetheless left at liberty at the personal behest of Stalin, who allowed him to work as an assistant at the Moscow Arts Theatre although denying him a passport, which would have permitted him to leave the USSR. At the time, he was banned from publication and his early works, The White Guard and Heart of a Dog had been confiscated. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was aged thirty-seven when, in 1928, he began writing The Master and Margarita, which was to become one of the most important works of twentieth century Russian literature. The Master and Margarita gives Simon McBurney and Complicite the raw material for this generous, poignant and imaginative piece of theatre and demonstrates once again that literary and theatrical expression are amongst the most powerful means of communication invented by humankind. ![]() A novel conceived during the recent past in a twentieth century full of horror a novel which denounces the corruption of the mind and sets against it the motions of the heart a timeless novel, shaking up the tendency to apathy which can sometimes take hold of the human race. Helped by the astonishingly assured work of his actors and creative team, McBurney daringly plunges us in seconds from one story to another, letting us navigate with ease this labyrinth of thought and emotion. He joyously mixes up Bulgakov's imagined universes: Moscow, where Stalin lurks and watches Heaven and hell, where Satan utters unbearable truths Jerusalem, where we find Pontius Pilate and a philosophical Jesus bound closely together and a psychiatric hospital, a refuge for desperate and exhausted writers. Simon McBurney's power lies in his ability to combine the traditional crafts and methods of the theatre with the most sophisticated modern technology so he can bring a horse to life with a handful of chairs but equally have his actors fly across the Moscow sky without lifting a foot of the stage. The Master is that solitary and oppressed writer in the image of a Bulgakov crushed by the tyrannical madness of Stalinist power Margarita, that amorous, whole and courageous woman. In all this, the director permits himself all the elements which go to make up Bulgakov's writing: the passion and compassion of The Master and of Margarita in their love and in their freedom the bitter and delirious comedy of the social and political satire the clear-eyed and tragic attitude of a writer to his work even the poetic and dream-like images which whirl the characters off into a fantastic other world. From this vast profusion, he has found a theatrical form and cleared a path to follow three intermingled stories, stories whose ends and whose connections will not become clear until the end of this looking-glass tale. ![]() Which elements of this enormous novel - speaking as it does of love, of art and of politics - which elements do you hang on to when adapting the work for the Palais de Pape? Simon McBurney has decided to be faithful to the decidedly deconstructed construction of The Master and Margarita and to its narrative, which hurtles from Moscow to Jerusalem and from Heaven to hell.
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