Through this intertwined narrative (later revealed to have been written by the eponymous Master), Bulgakov explores Pilate’s complicity in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his own conflicting spiritual appreciation of and need for Christ. Intertwined with this storyline, however, is Bulgakov’s own retelling of the New Testament, which is set in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Following the staging of a show by Woland at the Variety Theater in Moscow, he leaves the city in disarray with its vices on full display and law and order abandoned. The novel begins when the devil (Professor Woland) pays a visit to Moscow in the 1930s and joins in with a conversation between a poet and a critic (both of whom are members of the Soviet literary elite) on how best to deny the existence of Jesus Christ, as was in compliance with the Soviet Union’s official atheism. The reason for this was that The Master and Margarita is an allegorical indictment of the Soviet Union, including its state-sanctioned literary establishment. Today, however, he is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, which he began writing in 1928 but was still unpublished by the time of his death in 1940 and was only published in a heavily censored edition between 19 thanks to the efforts of his widow, Elena Shilovskaya. Mikhail Bulgakov Photograph of Mikhail Bulgakov, via IMDbīorn in Kyiv, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire and later part of the Soviet Union) on May 15th, 1891, Mikhail Bulgakov was a writer and medical doctor best known during his own lifetime for his dramatic works. In the collection’s titular short story, he pioneered the hypertext narrative and, by introducing real historical events from the First World War into the story in (at times) quite a granular level of detail, he created a narrative in which reality is stranger than fiction.Ģ. In 1941, he published his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ( The Garden of Forking Paths), which was later included in Ficciones ( Fictions). It was during his convalescence that he allowed himself the freedom to explore a new writing style – the style that would make his name as a writer. In 1938, Borges’s father died, and later that same year, he himself sustained a severe head injury, during the treatment of which he contracted a near-fatal case of sepsis. Coetzee credited Borges, “more than anyone,” with “renovat the language of fiction and thus open the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists.” Blending philosophy with mythology and elements of the fantastical, he pioneered a surrealist yet cerebral style that informed many of his magical realist successors’ works.Īngel Flores claims that Borges was the original magical realist writer, while the South African writer J. Jorge Luis Borges Photograph of Jorge Luis Borges, via IMDbīorn in Buenos Aires on August 24th, 1899, Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo would go on to become one of Argentina’s most celebrated essayists, poets, translators, and short story writers. Later artists associated with Magic Realism include the American George Tooker (1920–2011), whose best-known work Subway (1950 New York, Whitney).1. In Belgium its surreal strand was exemplified by René Magritte, with his ‘fantasies of the commonplace’, and in the USA by Peter Blume, as in South of Scranton (1930–31 New York, Met.) and The Eternal City. The work of Giuseppe Capogrossi and the Scuola Romana of the 1930s is also closely related to the visionary elements of Magic Realism. It had strong connections with the Italian Pittura Metafisica of which the work of Giorgio de Chirico was exemplary in its quest to express the mysterious. The term was introduced by art historian Frank Roh in his book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (1925) to describe a style deriving from Neue Sachlichkeit, but rooted in late 19th-century German Romantic fantasy. It occupies a position between Surrealism and Photorealism, whereby the subject is rendered with a photographic naturalism, but where the use of flat tones, ambiguous perspectives, and strange juxtapositions suggest an imagined or dreamed reality. Style of painting popular in Europe and the USA mainly from the 1920s to 1940s, with some followers in the 1950s.
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