Daily Cascade

My Reading at the Moment

Prompt: Reading
What books are you reading right now? Write about this in your Blog entry today.

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I read a few chapters from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov who died in 1940. It was translated from Russian by Mirra Ginsburg. From so far that I've read, the story seems to be about the existence of God.

The novel begins in a night in Moscow at Patriarch's Ponds, where Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz and Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev have a mysterious encounter with a weird guy, Professor Woland, who is the devil. The thing is, here, the devil tries to tell the Russian unbelieving people that God exists.

Then, there is also another time of space of 2000 yrs. ago with Pontius Pilate and Yesha Ha-Nozri conversing. Pilate, although he tries not to, condemns Yeshua to death. Their discussion is similar to that of the devil and the non-believer Russians. There are themes, ideas, and imagery from Christianity and the supernatural. I guess this book could be called a dark comedy that criticized the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. For that reason, this novel was published two decades after its writer's death.

I'm really trying to get the meaning in this novel more thoroughly, and I'm sticking with it because it won many awards and was made into a film, if I'm not mistaken. My problem in reading The Master and Margarita especially happened between the first and the second chapters. I saw no explanation why the story jumped to 2000 years ago, and there was no ease of passage between its chapters. Maybe, I'll like this book and maybe not, but I'm sticking with it till its end.

Tomorrow, Ta Nehisi Coates' book The Message in hardcover is scheduled to arrive. At this point, I'm probably more interested in reading that one. Also, I just got in Kindle, Money GPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy by James Rickards, and Letters by Oliver Sacks. I'm actually dying to read these two Kindle books plus the hardcover one that'll arrive tomorrow. Still, I'll finish Mikhail Bulgakov's book, as well. I promised myself that.

By the way, Mikhail Bulgakov was an Ukrainian, born in Kyiv at the time. and yet, he was and still is much hailed as a very famous Russian author. Go figure! How things change!