Read and surreal in Master and Margarita

The genius of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," difficult as the story line is to follow at times - damn those Russian names! - is the way in which Bulgakov uses comedy and fantsy to convey the horrors of life in an oppressive police state - there are echos of Kafka throughout but in a way the knife is even sharper in that with Kafka (e.g., The Castle or The Trial) you know throughout that you're in a surreal and dreamlike landscape in which the individual is crushed by the oppressive forces of a bureaucratic society, but in Bulgakov it's like super-Kafka: if you knew absolutely nothing about Soviet Russia and the police state and the disappearances of anyone who spoke out against the state you cold just read through the whole novel, presumably, and think it's a funny, offbeat, eccentric tale about a shaman-like character who - the foreigner, the professor, the consultant, Woford the magician as he is variously called - who is a trickster or confidence man and who shows up unannounced and leads people on to ill fate: one man gets beheaded, another accepts a petty bribe and then is set upon by the police and hauled off, others leave the city for no apparent reason and nobody can find them - and it all seems surreal and impossible and dreamlike, that is, Kafkaesque, until you take a step back and say, yes, but this really happened, and happens still in totalitarian states: people vanishing in the middle of the night or day for that matter, people calling home to say they're away on a sudden trip and never to be heard from again, people startled in the middle of dinner by a visit from the police and taken away. Is it crazier to imagine this to be the work of a shaman, of is it crazier to imagine this to be the work of a political tyrant? Is it more insane to imagine people do this to one another in order to maintain power? Bulgakov takes the horrors of oppression and turns them inside out, like a glove, and makes tragedy into broad-stroke comedy. And as we read him, and try to imagine his world as if it were real, we see how it would be impossible to live in his world - yet we realize that, surreal trappings aside, people did live in that world, and still do, a world in which people can disappear suddenly and it's not magic, it's brute, oppressive force.