Paolo Nori, an Italian writer and translator specialising in Russian literature, is coming to the LAC to discussThe Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece, perhaps the most contemporary of the 20th-century Russian classics: a novel about good and evil, about justice, and about the relationship between art and literature, which reveals more about us than we might care to know.

“When, in 1967, Einaudi published a novel by a Russian writer who had died in 1940 and was unknown to us – says Paolo Nori – Mikhail Bulgakov’s *The Master and Margarita*, Eugenio Montale wrote that we were faced with ‘a miracle that everyone must greet with emotion’. The following year, in 1968, the Rolling Stones recorded a song, Sympathy for the Devil, which Mick Jagger wrote after reading The Master and Margarita. This devil, so likeable, who in the novel is called Woland, when he meets, in the centre of Moscow, Levi Matteo, the envoy of good, who makes no secret of his contempt for him, says to him: ‘You speak as if you knew nothing of shadows, nor even of evil. But try, if you can, to ponder this question: what would your good ever do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows were to vanish? Men and things cast shadows. Look at the shadow of my sword. And the shadows of the trees and living beings. Do you wish to strip the entire globe bare, removing all the trees, all living beings, for your fantasy of enjoying the naked light? You are a fool’.
The Master and Margarita is the great novel by a great Russian writer born in Ukraine who, in March 1930, wrote to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR: ‘Going through my newspaper clippings, I found that, in the ten years of my literary career, I had received 301 reviews from the Soviet press, of which 3 were favourable and 298 hostile and abusive’. ”