Bortko’s reverence for Bulgakov’s words is evident from start to finish, making for a fascinating work (especially for those of us convinced that a proper adaptation was unfeasible), but also an obsessive and exasperating one.įor all its undeniable charms, the series is glacially paced and downright ponderous. The director was Vladimir Bortko, who seemed determined to capture the novel’s every nuance over the course of 500 none-too-sprightly minutes. Thus the miniseries under discussion, even though I’m not entirely enamored with it, must be counted as the premiere filmic rendering of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA. Filmmakers as varied as Roman Polanski, Andrei Tarkovksy and Elem Klimov all made attempts at filming the novel, but none came to fruition. The program followed several previous attempts at adapting this remarkable work, including a bad Italian feature from 1975 and a 1994 Russian film that due to copyright issues was never properly released. This expensive 10-part miniseries adaptation of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, broadcast on Russia’s state television channel in December of 2005, was heavily publicized in its native country and extremely widely viewed. And there’s yet another layer to THE MASTER AND MARGARITA in its decidedly unorthodox depiction of the life of Pontius Pilate and his involvement in the death of Jesus Christ, an event flashed back to at several points in the text, it having a definite bearing on what occurs in the novel’s present.ĭespite not having been published until the 1960s, the book is said to be all-but ubiquitous in modern Russia. The latter is a thinly fictionalized portrayal of Bulgakov’s own spouse Elena Shilovskaya, who allegedly completed THE MASTER AND MARGARITA after her husband’s death in 1940. Yet Bulgakov also includes an autobiographical element in his sad depiction of the Master, a persecuted writer who burns the manuscript of his latest novel in a frenzy of self-censorship (as Bulgakov did an early draft of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA), and his beloved wife Margarita. In this way Bulgakov takes a sledgehammer to the tradition of “Soviet realism” while offering a none-too-subtle critique of Stalinist Russia, with its staunch atheism and stifling bureaucracy. A series of outrageous comedic set pieces see various bureaucratic functionaries laid low by the Professor and his comrades. the Professor, arrives in Moscow one day with a retinue that includes a talking cat named Behemoth and a vampire seductress. THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is the wildly fantastic, satirical account of what transpires when the Devil, a.k.a. This televised adaptation is notable for its unerringly faithful rendering of that book, although it misses much of what makes Bulgakov’s text the immortal classic it is. Having read Bulgakov’s masterpiece twice, I find it a remarkable piece of work that fully retains all the shocking and insightful satire of its 1930s-era inception. The novel is widely considered one of the supreme masterpieces of 20 th Century literature, and I’m not about to dispute that assessment. This Russian miniseries is the most accurate and monumental adaptation yet attempted of Mikhail Bulgakov’s MASTER AND MARGARITA.
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