Subhash Jaireth

And one of the other famous Ukrainian writers was Nikolai Gogol.

whose famous story or novella The Nose is very famous and the overcoat.

And so Bulgakov inherited that tradition of very satirical, very now which we call it magic realism sort of writing from Gogol.

And that's what he started using it in Master and Margarita.

So there is a love story between Master and Margarita.

Master is the writer, which is a sort of based on...

alter ego of Mikhail Bulgakov himself.

And then there is the other story which is going on about the Russian, the Soviet Writers Union, who are against the master, who don't want to publish the book he has written.

And to help him, the devil steps in and the devil then starts doing tricks

throughout Moscow to take revenge against these officials, apparatchiks of the Writers' Union in Moscow.

Perhaps that's what people didn't, the government didn't like it.

The Soviet authorities didn't like it, that it was very subversive.

It was exposing the going-ons, not only in the Union, but in the broad Soviet society at the time.

Oh, good books actually demand time and engagement.

And when you read those books, they challenge you.

Not only are they a source of information, but much more than that.

They tell you about yourself, about your own deep time and small time.

And you start questioning your whole being in this world.

And this was one of the books.

And when I read that book, lots of things which I was not very aware of became making sense to me.