Another guide to the novel
Regular visitors to this website will undoubtedly already know Everything You Always Wanted to Know About The Master and Margarita, our guide to better understand Mikhail Bulgakov's novel. There are several such books in the Russian language area but, so far, we were the only ones to offer a guide of this kind in the English, French and Dutch language areas. Perhaps that will change and we may have company soon, at least for the English speaking area.
One of the most famous Russian guides is the bookПутеводитель по роману Михаила Булгакова or Guide to Mikhail Bulgakov's nove lby the writing duo Georgy Lesskis and Ksenia Atarova. It was first published in 2017 by the Russian publishing house Padruga.
Now the British/Dutch publisher Glagoslav Publications announces that it will publish an English translation of that book under the title Guide to M. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. The publisher already announced the ISBN number and the price of the work on its website, but the name of the translator is not mentioned, nor is the expected publication date. You can already pre-order it - and pay for it, of course. At the bottom of this article you can read in a comment why we specifically emphasise this.
Since the Guide to M. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is not available yet, I cannot tell you much about it yet, but we have known the Russian original for a long time, so we can tell you a few things about it
In short, the work of Georgy Lesskis and Ksenia Atarova has roughly the same intentions as our Everything You Always Wanted to Know About The Master and Margarita. Like us, they want to present a guide that will help the reader to better understand the novel, although the authors don't go as extensive as we do in our edition.
The structure of Guide to Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is also different. The authors opted for an encyclopaedic approach. So, their book is an alphabetically arranged collection of entries containing information about subjects, characters, and places featured in the novel. They are profusely illustrated with photos that, unfortunately, are not always of high quality and that sometimes have incorrect captions. A photo of Moscow in the 1940s, for example, shows cars that were not produced until the 1960s, and the buildings that should have been shown on them were demolished between 1939 and 1955. That problem may have been remedied in the English translation, but we obviously don't know that yet.
Furthermore, I do not know whether the English translator took into account that the work of Georgy Lesskis and Ksenia Atarova was written for a Russian audience. Some concepts from the novel that are self-evident for a Russian audience, and whose satirical message they can immediately grasp, are therefore not dealt with in their book, although they really need to be explained for an English-speaking audience in order to fully benefit from Bulgakov's enjoy satire. Just think of the fickle chervontsi, which are simply «ten-rouble bills» to the unsuspecting English reader, without suspecting why these bills behave so strangely at various places in the novel. We wonder if the translators have thought of that
Anyway, the book Guide to M. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita will have its merits for a large part of the readers. People who want to dig deeper will find more to their liking in our work - and also in Dutch and French
The arrow below directs you to the page where, in addition to the book by Georgy Lesskis and Ksenia Atarova and our own books, we present to you all the works that explain The Master and Margarita.
The Russian original, the announced English translation, and our own work
Good to know
At the start of the above article I was writing about the pre-orders at Glagoslav Publications. There is a reason for this: after all, I personally had a not so good experience with it. In 2017 it was possible to pre-order - with advance payment of course - their «upcoming» English translation of the basic work Жизнеописание Михаила Булгакова or Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov from 1988 by the lamented Marietta Chudakova. The English title would become Bulgakov, The Life and Times. However, the release date was repeatedly pushed back and the book remained listed as «upcoming» for several years. It would have been published in 2019, but I still haven't received it. To satisfy my curiosity about that translation, I bought the e-book.
For your information: at first glance, Bulgakov, The Life and Times looks like a good book. But perhaps you should read my review of it by clicking the arrow below before ordering it.