The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Hypocrites, had been banned by the Soviet authorities (who, unsurprisingly, did not care for the title). After five years’ work, he abandoned a second draft in 1936. He commenced a third draft the same year and chiselled away at it, making corrections and additions, until April 1940, when illness forced him to abandon his labours. A few weeks later, Bulgakov expired, exasperated. Macтep и Mapгapитa was completed by his widow, Elena Sergeevna; and it was she who spent the next twenty-five years trying to get it published. (‘Eлeнa, мoя любoвь, ecть кoe-чтo, чтo мы дoлжны oбcyдить …’^fn8)

      fn7. ‘I need a smoke!’

      fn8. ‘Elena, my love, there is something we need to discuss …’

      Have you read The Master and Margarita? It cannot be denied that the early part of the book is often inscrutable, a barrage of in-jokes savaging institutions and individuals of the early Soviet era which only an antique Muscovite or an authority on early twentieth-century Russian history would recognise or find amusing. And then there is the business with Rome and Pontius Pilate. Essentially, it is a book one has to stick with and trust.

      Here are the bare bones of the plot. The Devil lands in Moscow, disguised as a magician. With Him is an infernal entourage: a witch, a valet, a violent henchman with a single protruding fang, and an enormous talking cat called Behemoth, a tabby as big as a tiger. The diabolic gang leave a trail of panic and destruction across the literary and governmental Moscow landscape. Sometimes this is grotesquely amusing, at others terrifying; frequently it is both. In a lunatic asylum we are introduced to the master, a disillusioned author whose novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate (ah, I see!) has been rejected for seemingly petty reasons. His response has been to burn the manuscript and shut out the world, even turning away his lover, Margarita, who ardently believes in his work.

      Of course, I only appreciated the autobiographical significance of this in retrospect and the communistic targets of the satire remained obscure to me. In terms of the story itself, the promise of the severed head was slow to be realised. Had it not been for the half-forgotten kick of reading a book at all, I probably would not have carried on; for the first couple of days, I was compelled to do so by little more than my own stubbornness. This is only a book; I like reading books; this one will not get the better of me. But the more I read, the more I understood – or rather, understood that I did not need to understand. If I let it, the book would carry me instead.

      The Master and Margarita begins as a waking nightmare. It has the relentlessness of a nightmare, the same persistent illogic one finds in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but nastier, crueller – dead eyes, derision, severed heads, a cat whose mischievous grin betokens only black magic. Once in train, it is pitiless. But for the nightmare to take hold, the reader must fall asleep and wake up somewhere else.

      Back in reality, though, I had to stay awake. I read in fifteen- or twenty-minute bursts, in lunch breaks or during Tikkabilla. It wasn’t a good way to go about it. To engage with this book when there were tasks to be performed, emails to be sent, ham sandwiches to be packed, or a purple dragon singing a song about being friends, was hard. It required sacrifices. Wine, TV and conversation were all postponed. It also required selfishness and cunning. ‘Just off to the Post Office,’ I would announce at the busiest hour of the day, ‘I won’t be long.’ And in the gloriously slow-moving queue, I would turn a few more pages.

      At the beginning of the second half of the novel, Margarita is transformed into a witch at the Devil’s command. She accepts an invitation to His great Spring Ball. This is when both Margarita – and The Master and Margarita – take flight. She soars naked across Mother Russia – across the cities and mountains and rivers – transformed, ecstatic and free. And as she does, borne aloft on Bulgakov’s impassioned words, I felt the dizzying force of books again, lifting me off the 6.44, out of myself, away from Mrs Atrixo and her hands. How had I lived without this?

      The Master and Margarita is a novel about many things, some obscure, others less so. To me, at this point in my life, it seems to be a book about books; and I love books. But I seem to have lost the knack of reading them.

      After the ball, Margarita is granted a wish by the Devil. She asks only that the master be restored to her from the asylum. And then: ‘Please send us back to his basement in that street near the Arbat, light the lamp again and make everything as it was before.’

      ‘An hour later Margarita was sitting, softly weeping from shock and happiness, in the basement of the little house in one of the sidestreets off the Arbat. In the master’s study all was as it had been before that terrible autumn night of the year before. On the table, covered with a velvet cloth, stood a vase of lily-of-the-valley and a shaded lamp. The charred manuscript-book lay in front of her, beside it a pile of undamaged copies. The house was silent. Next door on a divan, covered by his hospital dressing-gown, the master lay in a deep sleep, his regular breathing inaudible from the next room … She smoothed the manuscript tenderly as one does a favourite cat and turning it over in her hands she inspected it from every angle, stopping now on the title page, now on the end.’

      But of course an arrangement with the Devil has its price. Life cannot stay the same. For the master and Margarita to live forever, their old selves must die. She will stay at the Devil’s side, he will be free to roam the cosmos:

      ‘“But the novel, the novel!” she shouted at the master, “take the novel with you, wherever you may be going!”

      “No need,” replied the master. “I can remember it all by heart.”

      “But you … you won’t forget a word?” asked Margarita, embracing her lover and wiping the blood from his bruised forehead.

      “Don’t worry. I shall never forget anything again,” he answered.’

      It took me a little over five days to finish The Master and Margarita, but its enchantment lasted far longer. In death, the master and his book become as one. The book is no longer a passive object, a bundle of charred paper, but the thing which lives within his heart, which he personifies, which allows him to travel wherever and whenever he likes. The deal Margarita makes with the Devil gives him eternity. And this is how The Master and Margarita had made its journey down a century, from reader to reader, to a Broadstairs bookshop. Some part of that book, of Bulgakov himself, now lived on in me. The secret of The Master and Margarita, which seems to speak to countless people who know nothing about the bureaucratic machinations of the early Stalinist dictatorship or the agony of the novel’s gestation: words are our transport, our flight and our homecoming in one.

      Which you don’t get from Dan Brown.

      So began a year of reading dangerously. The Master and Margarita had brought me back to life. Now, if I could discover the gaps in the daily grind – or make the gaps – I knew I could stay there. Could I keep that spark alive in the real world, I wondered? Yes! Because to do so would truly be to never forget anything again. All I needed was another book; that was the deal. This was not reading for pleasure, it was reading for dear life. But, looking back, perhaps I should have stopped to think. With whom, exactly, had the deal been struck?

      ‘The master, intoxicated in advance by the thought of the ride to come, threw a book from the bookcase on to the table, thrust its leaves into the burning tablecloth and the book burst merrily into flame.’

       Book Two

      Middlemarch by George Eliot

      ‘He had two selves within him apparently, СКАЧАТЬ