Михаил Булгаков: Собрание сочинений Том 1. Дьяволиада.

A quite terrible book!

A scrap heap of ideas and that of a good writer's waste paper basket, self arranged, not having finally heart to throw even petty crumbles away. But not completely that. Big irony gives the justification of existence for this work.

Quite justified, hiwever, is here the question: where is the beef? Another big question is in my mind from the beginning to the end: how can this man have survived in the Soviet system? Sheer non-hidden irony of the system everything he writes. Or isn't the totalitarian system not so totalitarian as we imagine? Or has it a much thicker skin than we imagine?

Sheer scrap heap material are the countless small passages of some loose sentences which start of nowhere abd end up to nowhere. Expressions of frustration, undefined frustration or so very tiny everyday frustration that as such they are insignificant. But perhaps just that is the beef, the fruit of the big bureaucracy of questionary and subscript of authorization in the least details of life.

At the end of the book this subscribed paper irony is brought to the utmost finality by letting the hero run heart in throat floor scales and doors without end in search for a most modest bed place in shared room somewhere in the Soviet heaven of Moscow. This story is not a mere scrap heap leaving the reader with just a headful of question marks. The bureaucratic mockery of democracy becomes clear, from the first steps on. Bulgakov does not loosen his grip of the poor reader. He is a deserving writer, in good and bad, in this case more in bad.