Why we didn't read Bulgakov in the 1970s

So ultimately what is Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" about?: as the master and Margarita head off to salvation at the end, granted peace rather than "the light," as translator Pevear points out (the light being = fame and fortune and knowledge, which I think connects with Faust and Goethe himself, whose last words were "more light") - it seems to me a novel about a man who writes and unpublishable novel and knows it will never be published and suffers because of this but is ultimately redeemed through posthumous publication, and the novel is the very book we're reading - it's both a bizarre fantasy and a literal predictive document: Bulgakov envisioned his own fate and the fate of the work he was writing and we are reading. It's a novel that in a sense makes itself impossible: we have to recognize it as unpublishable, but then how is it that we're reading it? These complex connections and allusions remind me of fave professor Richard Macksey's description of Proust as "funhouse of the mind" : Bulgakov is the same, but I'm not sure his house is such fun - more like a house of horrors. I'm surprised in retrospect that The M&M was not one of the books in the post-modern canon of the 60s and 70s, when we were enthralled with so many discoveries from Europe and Latin America: Calvino, Svevo, Garcia Marquez, Cortazar - to name a few. But it's as if from the Soviet Union we were seeking and expecting only works of overt political defiance: Solzhenitsyn, e.g. - not antic works of experiment. Ultimately, I can't say it's a great novel, though there's greatness in it - Bulgakov does himself no favors by including not only so many characters with their difficult but by perversely referring to each character by many different handles: the procurator, the professor, the foreigner, et al. It's a book that could definitely benefit from careful study or a group read, but in the end would the game be worth the candle? Some of it is so good, so funny - but some, particularly in Part II, is just so over the top and odd and ungrounded in any known reality that I'm not sure it's worth spending hours unearthing each of Bulgakov's references or drawing together the many strands so that we can follow the life of each of the many characters. One of those rare books about which it's relatively easy to see what it means and very hard to see or to say what happens.