A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia

National Review ^ | April 1, 2024 | Jay Nordlinger

[GOPJ]

I am sure that I'm not the only freeper who read The Master and Margarita back in the day. It is a classic, though for me it falls into the "classics I read so long ago that I would need to reread before opining on it" category. (I've been tempted to reread it a couple of times when Jordan Peterson starts singing its praises, but that's a another story.)

Pure wordsmithery there sphinx... might be time for you to start work on that novel you always wanted to write.

[Stosh]

Amen to that - I don’t know if anyone other than the Coens could get away of making fun of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ and jerk weeds like Herbert Marcuse. And I also liked the fact that they painted characters like Eddie Mannix and Hobie Doyle in a favorable light, as (pretty much) just genuine dudes, trying to do their job as best they could. Not the most profound Coen brothers cinematic effort, but it left me with a warm feeling of satisfaction.

[Chewbarkah]

I’d like to think that in some small part Bulgakov wrote M&M as a means of crucifying the Chekists responsible for censoring it. Imagine their pleasure explaining the book to Comrade Stalin.

[sphinx]

You have forced my hand. Now I have to reread it.

[dfwgator]

I’d still like to see a real-life version of “Tibor’s Tractor”, with Nikita Khrushchev reincarnated as a tractor.

[sphinx]

Thanks for the recommendations. Letterboxd has a convenient app for keeping a watchlist, to which I add all freeper recommendations. It’s easy, intuitive and free. I recommend it to all, and especially the folks who say they won’t watch any recent films.

From this thread: The Checkist; The Inner Circle; The Edge; A Gentleman in Moscow; Hail Caesar.

From my Letterboxd diary: The Way Back (2010); The Death of Stalin (2017); Mr. Jones (2019); Chernobyl (the miniseries, 2019); Balloon (2018); As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me (2001); Ashes in the Snow (2018); First They Killed My Father (2017); Sunstroke (2014); Dear Comrades! (2020); Within the Whirlwind (2009); Eternal Winter (2018).

These are in the order I watched them per my Letterboxd diary. Several are very good. A couple are pretty average, judged purely on cinematic excellence, but they are all thematically sound. First They Killed My Father is an outlier, as it deals with the Cambodian holocaust (scandalously neglected by the film industry). It was an Angelina Jolie passion project (go figure); she has adopted kids from Cambodia and has the right idea about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Good for her.

[Stosh]

Thanks for the list - several I’ve not even heard of I’ll have to check out. But the absolute best (of what I’ve seen) in pointing out the inherent evils in commie totalitarianism is “The Lives of Others”.

[Chewbarkah]

I want to read it again too, as well as watch the new film version. Once you deconstruct the profundities, please fill me in.

[Right Brigade]

“Hollywood (and much of the American far left) still loves communism in all its flavors...”

Who are Will Geer,Woody Guthrie and Burle Ives?
These people have been with us ever since lucifer fell like lightning.

[Chewbarkah]

So I found out last night that Bulgakov wrote M&M over a period of ten years and never attempt to publish it during his lifetime (there being a connection between publishing and remaining alive...). My theory bites the dust.

[sphinx]

I had friends in several different fields back in the day, none of them comsymp types, who knew something about the world of samizdat in the USSR. I don’t claim to know much about it, just enough to know that it is a fascinating tangle for those with the time and inclination to dive into it. There was an intellectual counterculture, mostly pre-political, that became the refuge of the honest people, and the creative people. Was M&M published abroad before it was published in Russia?

It’s always interesting when the truth tellers are forced underground — as in so many domains in the U.S. today. Appalling but interesting.

[Chewbarkah]

From Wikipedia’s extensive article (32 pages): Bulgakov died in 1940. His widow Elena published a censored version of the manuscript in the journal “Moskva” in 1966/1967. The missing parts were circulated as samizdat.

A manuscript with the missing parts made its way out of the USSR, and was published by the YMCA Press in Paris in 1967.
Another “complete” version published in Frankfurt in 1969.

In 1973 the Soviet journal “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” published a complete version based on the 1940 manuscript.