Fantastic Realism in Mikhail Bulgakov's Novel The Master and Margarita

About the event

In this talk, I will analyse Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, the most famous example of fantastic realism in twentieth-century Russian literature.

Written in the darkest period of Russian history, marked by Stalin’s terror, this subversive and blasphemous novel challenged the tyranny of the unitary ideology of the Soviet regime. There is no doubt that Bulgakov created his carnivalesque, fantastic narrative as a protest against the severe oppression of the soviet state under Stalinism and reflected the evils of Stalin’s Russia. Following the tradition of Nikolay Gogol, Bulgakov revived fantastic realism and applied it to the function of social criticism. As a result, though finished in 1945, the novel remained banned until 1966.

Written in the tradition of the Menippean satire, Bulgakov’s narrative mocks the sacred realm (the Soviet state) through the profane, lending itself to a Bakhtinian interpretation of the carnival as a temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order. In the novel, fantastic elements are fused with the ordinary, involving the direct and physical intervention of the divine or the demonic in an otherwise unexceptional flow of events. 

In my talk, I will analyse the features of magical realism in Bulgakov’s novel and how it is used to attack the secular ideology of abuse and politics of the totalitarian regime.

About the speaker

Associate Professor Dr Natalia Kaloh Vid works for the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Slovenia. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Translation Studies focusing on the influence of ideology on literary and translation production. Her second PhD degree is in Contemporary Russian Literature. 

Dr Vid has published extensively on literary translations from Russian into English and from English into Russian. She is also the author of the books 'Ideological Translations of Robert Burns’s Poetry in Russia and in the Soviet Union', published in 2011, and 'Rol´ apokaliptičeskogo otkrovenija v tvorčestve Mihaila Bulgakova' (The Role of Revelation in Mikhail Bulgakov’s prose), published in 2012, and she is the co-editor of the book of students’ translations of Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry and prose, 'M. J. Lermontov. Sanje: izbrano delo' (M. J. Lermontov. Dreams: Selected works) (2015).

How to join

The talk is free and everyone is welcome. No registration is necessary.

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