The Master and Margarita
>USSR was also terribly battered by WWII, and its leadership was not highly competent either The USSR moved all its industry eastward, as the German army advanced, waiting for the very last moment to do so. Quite an incredible feat that allowed them to beat Germany at industrial efficiency and secure victory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Union Here's an analysis of the mechanisms underpinning this kind of achievement according to a Russian mathematician: >One of the fathers of synergetics, G. Haken, in his article [9], recalls the following story from the Ancient…
I took a Master in Margarita class in college during my study abroad, with each class physically exploring a key Moscow scene from the novel. Our first class started at Патриаршие пруды (Patriarch's Pond), near where Anushka drops the oil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Ponds Now years later, I do data analysis to show how media can give us a skewed view of the world — and can be used to manipulate our beliefs: How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective…
"Fun" is such a broad word that it's hard to really draw a conclusion IMO. It's not exactly the first word that would come to mind when I describe the book but I suppose that it is, in fact, pretty fun even though the story being told is extremely bleak. You have witches, the devil, a talking cat, magic performances where people end up running around naked like headless chickens, a ball in hell etc... That's entertaining regardless of the morale of the story. I think that's one of the reasons this book is so very well liked, it combines fantasy with a very strong message. The Lord of the…
Life got you down? Take a piece of advice from another of Bulgakov's (author of Master and Margarita) novels and stop reading the news. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. So take the good doctor's words from Heart of a Dog: "If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic] never read soviet newspapers before dinner" and generalize it to the sources of outrage in your life that are getting you down. With that said, I highly recommend reading Master and Margarita as it is my favorite novel. It is a work however…
Say, how are things with adaptations of "The Master and Margarita" into other media? There was some Hollywood movie undergoing, or wasn't it? Pretty sure I didn't mistake it with the Fantastic Beasts franchise... I myself gonna humblebrag, one of my mods for Skyrim is named "Never Talk To NPCs" after the first chapter of the book. Of course it's only rehashing a few selected tropes, not an adaptation in the strict sense. So is "The Master and Margarita" really for people who feel low in their lifes? My activity once led me to reading a thread on 4chan about "The Master and Margarita", where…
When I was living in the United States and studying Russian, I started to read some Russian literature. After reading some short stories by Chekhov, I decided to delve into something harder: Dostoevsky. I couldn't understand the first page of Crime and Punishment even with a dictionary. Dostoevsky has a very eloquent way of writing with very long sentences and complicated grammar, but it's very hard for a non-native speaker to understand. So, I went to a Russian colleague of mine, who recommended that I try to read "The Master and the Margarita" instead of Crime and Punishment. I found…
Pretty agree with the post but it is funny he discovered that "truth" so late in his life. I generally consider mathematics and physics as being the higher achievements of human knowledge and it is normal to "worship" them as the most important field of study so much that some people dedicate their entire life to them with the same devotion of true monks. It is surprising that the author didn't include Physics in the fields that provides valuable and durable knowledge worth to acquire. Mathematics alone is sort of "sterile" when is not used within physics knowledge. Without physics it is a…
For one, many of the translations are just terribly wooden. But Russian is also very hard to translate to English, for several reasons; it's a heavily idiom-based language, full of common phrases (that every Russian knows) that an author can turn into puns or allusions. If the translator chooses to rewrite using the equivalent English idiom, the original meaning may be lost; whereas if it's translated literally, the reader won't know that it's a common saying that the author has subverted. The same thing goes with words that have multiple meanings, where the ambiguity itself resonates within…
The closest modern day equivalent to living in Stalinist Russia in the 30s is North Korea. At the slightest suspicion that one was somehow demonstrating disloyalty to the Soviet state one could be hauled away to be tortured and executed or sent to the Siberian Gulag to be slowly worked to death. Bulgakov's writings, if discovered, would have lead to him being executed. To people who lived in the system, their was an unacknowledged understanding that something bad was happening as people would mysteriously disappear on a regular basis. The movie "The Inner Circle" (…
Guess I'd been reflecting on how close CBO and EMO (if I'm doing justice to the ru meaning?) sound to me. But I was already complaining at the formation of the DHS that it sounded remarkably parallel to an infamous organisation: Department Ministerium of für Homeland Staats- Security sicherheit so I'm probably just a whiner and malingerer. There's always the general lesson; even if Hillel[0] didn't get nailed to a stick[1] for preaching it, he doesn't seem to have many followers in, say, Likud. A more specific lesson for the Old Country would be The Frogs Who…