“I’ll tell you a story,” Margarita began, and lay a heated hand on his closely cropped head. “There was once a lady. And she had no children, and generally had no happiness either. And so at first she cried for a long time, and then she became wicked . . .”

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was finished in its present form by the middle of 1938. The author died in 1940 and the novel was effectively suppressed until 1973.

It is a strange, surreal narrative, heavily influenced by Gogol, which traces the events let loose when the Devil himself alights on Moscow.

The depiction of the Devil is rich and complex, and that of the fearless Margarita even more so.

But the central fascination for me in the novel were the excerpts from the testimony of the man who assumed the role of judging Jesus Christ:

In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there emerged into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.

More than anything else on earth the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses, and everything now betokened a bad day ahead, for that smell had been haunting the Procurator since dawn. It seemed to the Procurator that the smell of roses was being emitted by the cypresses and palms in the garden, and that mingling with the smell of his escort’s leather accoutrements and sweat was an accursed waft of roses. From the wings at the rear of the palace that quartered the Twelfth Lightening Legion’s First Cohort, which had come to Yershalaim (Jerusalem) with the Procurator, a puff of smoke carried across the upper court of the garden into the colonnade, and with this rather acrid smoke, which testified to the fact that the cooks in the centuries had started preparing dinner, was mingling still that same heavy odour of roses.

“O gods, gods, why do you punish me?… No, there’s no doubt, this is it, it again, the invincible, terrible sickness… hemicrania, when half my head is aching… there are no remedies for it, no salvation whatsoever… I’ll try keeping my head still…”

On the mosaic floor by the fountain an armchair had already been prepared, and the Procurator sat down in it without looking at anyone and reached a hand out to one side. Into that hand his secretary deferentially placed a piece of parchment. Unable to refrain from a grimace of pain, the Procurator took a cursory sidelong look through what was written, returned the parchment to the secretary and said with difficulty:

“The man under investigation is from Galilee, is he? Was the case sent to the Tetrarch?”

“Yes, Procurator,” replied the secretary.

“And he did what?”

“He refused to give a decision on the case and sent the Sanhedrin’s death sentence for your ratification,” explained the secretary.

The Procurator pulled at his cheek and said quietly:
“Bring the accused here.”

The Devil works with magic, he beheads people, he undresses women and makes them walk nude in the street, he drives people insane, he disappears others and tortures many. The references to Stalin’s repressive Soviet Union suggest themselves time and time again.

But the book, the work itself, surpasses all of the tricks of the Devil. It has so many layers and depths, is so fascinating, serious, and bizarrely funny, that I had the distinct impression I was reading several novels at the same time.

And far from distracting me, I found myself even more intrigued.

Perhaps this is one to read again? Or, if you haven’t yet read it the first time, put it on the list.

Europe’s most blatant example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ a foreign ministry spokesman spluttered. ‘It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.’
From Leon Trotsky on, the Soviet regime has killed exiles. The difference between the old and the new Russia is that now Russia can buy the support of corporations and capitalists who will excuse their crimes.
In The New Cold War, his study of Putin’s impact on Europe, Edward Lucas of the Economist argues that the Russian elite has understood that money can be used to undermine freedom because there are many in the West who believe that ‘capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom’.

Discuss.

In 1958, (Dave) Brubeck visited 12 countries, including Poland, Turkey, East and West Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran and Iraq. As Brubeck explained it, “We were out 120 days without a day off, and it was rough travel. The water wasn’t fit to drink, but you got so thirsty, you drank it. The State Department didn’t want us to come home. They wanted us to stay out. They cancelled our concerts here at home.”

In an interview with National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia several years ago, Brubeck told how the Voice of America had been his warm-up band: “Most of the people, when they spoke to you in English, sounded like Willis Conover from the Voice of America. His show came on every night worldwide. . . To this day . . . you can hear his voice. In Russia, people sound like Willis. If you listened to my recordings in the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the Cold War, you could be sent to Siberia or worse. They listened to my records, and they called it ‘Jazz in Bones.’ Using X-ray plates, they could record Willis Conover and get a fairly good recording. If you were caught with that, you were dead. But the doctors and the nurses and the students would very carefully listen to these recordings, and they had underground jazz meetings all the time.”

The exhibition presents modern masterpieces drawn from Russia’s principal collections: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

The biggest surprise was the colour and vibrancy of Matisse’s The Dance; but there were many other paintings on show, by Braque, Picasso, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Chagall, Kandinsky, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and others, including a section devoted to Russian Cubo-Futurism.

The exhibition will remain at the Royal Academy of Arts until the 18th April.

On his website, Pirate Coelho, you are allowed to download his novels for free.

Coelho’s view is that letting people have digital copies of his books without payment increases sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he spoke about how uploading the Russian translation of The Alchemist made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more.