The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Klimowski, and Schejbal

Some books are deliberately obscure, as protective coloration. Some are obscure because time has passed. Some are obscure because they're from foreign countries, where they do things differently.

In the English language, in the year 2024, Mikhail Bulgakov's thorny, fascinating novel The Master and Margarita is all three of those things: a book written almost in code, to foil Stalinist censors in 1930s Russia. (It didn't quite work: the novel wasn't published until 1966, a quarter-century after Bulgakov died.) And this graphic adaptation, by the Polish-British team of Andrej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, inevitably adds another layer of obscurity, turning Bulgakov's prose into pictures, ready to be interpreted in wildly different ways based on the reader's knowledge and experience.

I'm no expert on Bulgakov, or Soviet Moscow. I can point out that the religious material here was clearly to tweak the noses of the dogmatically atheist Communist establishment, but not how much Bulgakov meant any of it - I have a sense the overwhelming power of the devil in this book, and his mercurial moods, is at least partly meant as a metaphor for Stalin. But is Bulgakov's Jesus then equally a metaphor, or is he to be taken more literally? (I'm pretty sure entire dissertations have been written on better-thought-out versions of that question.)

If you know anything about The Master and Margarita, you know it's about the devil coming to Moscow, and the mischief he causes there. But the novel doesn't begin there. The main characters - an unnamed lottery winner engrossed in writing a long novel about Pontius Pilate and his new girlfriend - are clearly central, with their names in the title, but are pushed aside to sidebars repeatedly over the course of the rambling, discursive novel.

The Master writes his novel; the literary establishment scoffs at him, largely because he's not already a novelist. So the inherent power and qualities of the book - this is an axiom of Bulgakov's novel; the novel-in-a-novel is hugely important and powerful - are ignored, and The Master shuffled off to an asylum.

Flashforward a year, and the devil arrives under the name Professor Woland, tormenting and toying with the grandees of the local literary establishment. There are random deaths. Even worse, important men are turned out of their jealously-hoarded fancy Moscow apartments to accommodate Woland and his henchmen. Woland takes to the stage of a major theater to perform magic - which of course is not the illusions his audience expects.

Chaos surges, events spiral, and The Master is freed from his asylum. It all leads to a climax I really don't understand - I'm probably not Russian enough. And, all along the way, the scenes in Moscow are juxtaposed with scenes from The Master's novel, retelling the crucifixion story from Pilate's point of view.

As I said before: I admit I don't know what it all means. Much of this is symbolic, or coded. I think it's slightly clearer for modern English-language readers in the full novel - a graphic adaptation is inevitably for people who know the quirks and idiosyncrasies, and can read closely into the work.

I can say that Klimowski and Schejbal create interesting pages - separately; Klimowski works in black and white, mostly for the main story, and Schejbal in color, taking all of the Pilate story and occasional other pages - in blocky, usually dark, painterly panels of these strange people doing their strange things.

This is not a good substitute for the original novel, though. I read it once, long ago, in one translation, and have another copy in a newer translation waiting on my shelf. And I think I probably should have read the full book first - so let me leave that as my recommendation here. This is a fine adaptation, but it's the kind of adaptation that (I think) requires a solid knoweldge of the original to work best.