Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 183 posts

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#161

Post by internet555 »

chippy wrote: post #107
internet555 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the long-term effects of being unaware and uninformed on ones health?

This assumes that you would be not around people who will tell you in normal conversation important things that you should know. That would be the unhealthy thing. Most people can safely give up reading and watching the news and still be aware and informed through their normal daily interactions and lives of the world around them.

Well I think not having news might be better than watching Tv news or something, I’m not sure if choosing this is actually good in comparison to reading a reasonably good news source that’s not freaking out about trivialities all the time. And I say this as someone who is fairly out of the loop with many day current events / headlines and relies on other people to hear about like eg upcoming weather events or something

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#162

Post by Bartweiss »

toyg wrote: post #149
Bartweiss wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked it up at about the same time for some English class, and I remember being a bit shocked that something so obviously Deep and Literary could be quite so much fun. It's not the only example, of course, but for me it still occupies a special intersection between "flip through it when I'm not up to anything heavy" and "reread it carefully to see something new". I first picked up Lem not long after, and got the s…

Or perhaps "Russian literature" is a concept as vast as the country, and some of it transcends easy labels. Like Bulgakov, Dostoevsky was capable to write at various different levels.

Yes, certainly. I wasn't very clear, but my meaning was that there's a certain Western/American concept of "Russian Literature" as being exclusively long, philosophical, realistic, and depressing - as though The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina are the prototype for everything else.

But it's obviously not true; reducing Russian-language literature to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn is insulting crude. (And even Dostoevsky can be funny!) Bulgakov and Pasternak are at least recognized, but reduced to one work each. Zamyatin ought to be taught next to Orwell and Huxley, but he and a great many others are basically unknown. And all of that's before the conflation of Russian, Soviet, and Eastern Bloc work. Lem, Čapek, and so on aren't even Russian writers but get subsumed in the same category of thought.

It's a frustrating gap in American-read canon all around, and as a particular fan of sci-fi I think the focus on Russian 'literary' over 'genre' work has left a major hole in our perception of SF.

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#163

Post by innocentoldguy »

Tomte wrote: post #34
habosa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a version with enough footnotes to help me understand that underneath a funny and beautiful book is an attempt to use satire to say something serious about the regime that Bulgakov lived under. Part of what makes this book so great is how it is effective at this goal but also just fantastic literature. I'm a heavy reader but bad at reviews. All I can say is read this one. One of the best books I've ever read a…

I've read/skimmed two academic books commenting on The Master and Margarita and it lessened my enjoyment. There was lots and lots of "Woland is obviously not the devil, unlike everyone assumed" and much lofty discussion that I couldn't follow at all. I'd strongly advise to leave that out, but read a more conventional commentary like the web site linked somewhere in this thread.

I agree! I highly recommend against reading academic interpretations/critiques of any book. I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in creative writing. Much of my college study was focused on literary criticisms and theory. As someone trained in the art, I believe taking a perfectly good novel and blowing it through the enema of Marxist, Postmodernist, or Feminist activism, for instance, is the best way to shit all over an author's work.

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#164

Post by Koshkin »

GeoffKnauth wrote: post #122

This is one of my favorite books ever. I've read it in Russian and English. I have the DVDs of the TV series made in Russia about 10 years ago. Is there a Russian audiobook version anywhere?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=мастер+и+маргарита+аудиокнига

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#166

Post by Koshkin »

corpMaverick wrote: post #135
aleyan wrote: post #6

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 t…

Take the blue pill or the red pill ? Not reading the news will make you happier. Reading the news will make your life miserable. Still, I don't want to be the person that lives in a bubble without understanding how the world is moving and become part of the problem.

9/10 of all news is read for one's entertainment.

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#167

Post by blablablerg »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #163
Tomte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read/skimmed two academic books commenting on The Master and Margarita and it lessened my enjoyment. There was lots and lots of "Woland is obviously not the devil, unlike everyone assumed" and much lofty discussion that I couldn't follow at all. I'd strongly advise to leave that out, but read a more conventional commentary like the web site linked somewhere in this thread.

I agree! I highly recommend against reading academic interpretations/critiques of any book. I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in creative writing. Much of my college study was focused on literary criticisms and theory. As someone trained in the art, I believe taking a perfectly good novel and blowing it through the enema of Marxist, Postmodernist, or Feminist activism, for instance, is the best way to shit al…

I see how you graduated summa cum laude in creative writing.

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#168

Post by t3h2mas »

bardam wrote: post #99
sonnyg wrote: post #77

For people who have read it, what translation do you recommend?

Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband and wife team who have been translating Russian novels for close to 30 years. Having read most of Dostoevsky's works, some their translations, some others, I highly recommend their translations when available.

amazon (no ref): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143108271

in case anyone has the same issues I did finding it.

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#169

Post by felipeerias »

pvg wrote: post #154
felipeerias wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a point where most the inhabitants of a shared flat vanish one after the other as if by magic, leaving only one of them behind. Luckily, the footnotes point out the tiny clues in the text that tell the whole story: that tenant had denounced all of his flatmates to the secret police so he could keep the whole place for himself.

They're not really 'tiny clues' - this thread makes it sound like this stuff is some set of subtle veiled hints and allusions. It's certainly possible to miss if one is unfamiliar with the historical context and it's worth getting a well-annotated edition but it's hardly the intent of the author - there are lots of places where it's quite explicit and overt. The book itself could not be published when it was written…

I happen to be reading the novel at the moment, so it was easy to find an example. In this fragment, the master recounts the last time that he saw his loved one. The sentences are spread over 3-4 pages:

“This was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. [...] A quarter of an hour after she left me, there came a knock at my window [...] Yes, and so in mid-January, at night, in the same coat but with the buttons torn off, I was huddled with cold in my little yard.”

Just like that, three months have vanished. Those missing buttons are the only indication of where he spent those lost months: it was customary to remove belts, shoelaces and buttons from those held for questioning by the secret police.

Re: Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita

#170

Post by ragequitta »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #133
ragequitta wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case I've been publicly shamed once or twice because I'm not up on what the latest generation finds offensive. Maybe that's just what getting old is though. Apparently we're not allowed to say 'that one chick from the alien films' or 'miss/ms' enternamehere without deeply offending some of the population to the point of being yelled at. There are many other examples of this I'm sure, but I don't get out much. I…

Calling women "chick" has been iffy at best for at least 30 years. That's not new. I've never heard of "Ms." being an issue, though, since it explicitly doesn't make assumptions about marital status like Miss and Mrs. do. I'd guess that someone didn't actually know what it meant.

I've always considered chick the exact same as dude. It's just a synonym for girl/lady. If used improperly it can be offensive, but then I'd argue any sentence you can think of where it's used improperly you could replace "chick" with pretty much any synonym for girl/lady and it'd still be offensive.
Post reply on HN