The Quotations from "The Master and Margarita" in Russian Culture of the Second Half of 20th Century

The publication of the novel The Master and Margarita, that made its way to the reader almost thirty years after the author's death, became a significant event in the literary field of the Khrushchev Thaw period. The novel was immediately parsed into quotations, many of which are still reproduced in oral and written speech. This final paper attempts to explore the history of the reception of the novel from the point of view of the participation of subtext units in the cultural exchange, namely, the aphoristic utterances of Bulgakov's characters. According to R. Dawkins' theory, these statements will be regarded as memes — units of cultural information that compete against each other. This study aims to show that there is a connection between the existence of memes from Bulgakov's text and the cultural context of the late Soviet period, which is established through the archetypal figure of the trickster. The analysis of the trajectory of the distribution of the utterances in the cultural field and their immanent characteristics is intended to identify the cultural mechanisms that contributed to the consolidation of quotations from the novel in the collective memory.