Vladimir Samoylov times his narration so immaculately and inhabits the characters and the author's mind so well that the audiobook is best listened to at its intended speed.
The Master and Margarita is not many things. It is not as depressing as Russian literature is supposed to be. Indeed, the book is optimistic. The Master and Margarita is not magical realism, at least as long as magical realism is interpreted as sloppy surrealism. The book is not a satire, at least as long satire deploys political jibes to solicit approving nodes from ideological brethren. Indeed, the book is solicitous of no one but, perhaps, the drawer. The Master and Margarita is a private project that attempts to construct a causal system that would explain the events that are significant for humans and that would justify optimism.
The novel is humanist in that it celebrates individuals; it celebrates life. If one is in the business of cataloguing individual motives as being either good or evil, and one acknowledges the evil, then one no longer can be a humanist, for most individuals harbour evil, as well as good; one no longer can celebrate life as one finds it. Then, a humanist faces the choice between committing acts of evil in order to alter the life as one finds it and accepting both the good and the evil as parts of the human condition that deserves celebration. The latter option is the logically consistent one and is the one chosen by Bulgakov.
Individuals are selfish and yet not without a pro-social spark, an idiosyncratic idea of justice. Bulgakov the humanist celebrates the world in which each individual follows both motives---the selfish and the prosocial one---with abandon, without anyone telling this individual how to resolve the tension between the two motives and without anyone rebuking him for not being pro-social enough or pro-social in the right way.
John Roemer's Kantianism captures features of this philosophy. Each individual does unto others not as these others may wish that be done onto them (nor as some philosopher might wish) but as he himself wishes others did onto him. Under some conditions (all-positive or all-negative externalities), such behaviour leads to Pareto efficient outcomes. Under other conditions, it does not do so. What matters (to Bulgakov) is that everyone live his life to the fullest.
Robert Sugden proposes a notion of a responsible individual, an individual who has no regrets, who cares about the freedom to make mistakes more than he cares about being protected from mistakes. Bulgakov (in The Master and Margarita) advocates the notion of a just society as a responsible society, a society that maximises the freedom of individuals without passing judgment on the virtue of the actions that this freedom enables.
The Master and Margarita is not many things. It is not as depressing as Russian literature is supposed to be. Indeed, the book is optimistic. The Master and Margarita is not magical realism, at least as long as magical realism is interpreted as sloppy surrealism. The book is not a satire, at least as long satire deploys political jibes to solicit approving nodes from ideological brethren. Indeed, the book is solicitous of no one but, perhaps, the drawer. The Master and Margarita is a private project that attempts to construct a causal system that would explain the events that are significant for humans and that would justify optimism.
The novel is humanist in that it celebrates individuals; it celebrates life. If one is in the business of cataloguing individual motives as being either good or evil, and one acknowledges the evil, then one no longer can be a humanist, for most individuals harbour evil, as well as good; one no longer can celebrate life as one finds it. Then, a humanist faces the choice between committing acts of evil in order to alter the life as one finds it and accepting both the good and the evil as parts of the human condition that deserves celebration. The latter option is the logically consistent one and is the one chosen by Bulgakov.
Individuals are selfish and yet not without a pro-social spark, an idiosyncratic idea of justice. Bulgakov the humanist celebrates the world in which each individual follows both motives---the selfish and the prosocial one---with abandon, without anyone telling this individual how to resolve the tension between the two motives and without anyone rebuking him for not being pro-social enough or pro-social in the right way.
John Roemer's Kantianism captures features of this philosophy. Each individual does unto others not as these others may wish that be done onto them (nor as some philosopher might wish) but as he himself wishes others did onto him. Under some conditions (all-positive or all-negative externalities), such behaviour leads to Pareto efficient outcomes. Under other conditions, it does not do so. What matters (to Bulgakov) is that everyone live his life to the fullest.
Robert Sugden proposes a notion of a responsible individual, an individual who has no regrets, who cares about the freedom to make mistakes more than he cares about being protected from mistakes. Bulgakov (in The Master and Margarita) advocates the notion of a just society as a responsible society, a society that maximises the freedom of individuals without passing judgment on the virtue of the actions that this freedom enables.
