I feel bad for not liking Master and Margarita

I know this is such a beloved book, even hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time etc, etc and I really tried to like it.

Unfortunately , it just didn't captivate me at all and I really had a hard time finishing the last 50 pages totally conceding that it could be total intellectual inferiority on my part :).

I did some research after finishing the book and thought really hard as to why I didn't like the book and here are some of my conclusions.

• I am not Russian and my knowledge about life in the Sovjet era is limited. I think that context would have helped somewhat. Without it, it is not clear at all that the novel's main idea be a criticism of that Regime. I mean corruption and greed as far it is laid out in the book applies almost to every society and there was nothing that pointed out to the fact that novel had an issue with the corruption of the USSR other than the author having lived in that era.
• Berlioz and Ivan are supposed to represent the Oppressive Soviet arm of cultural affairs of the government, but there is actually nothing that I encountered to reflect that point of view. The arguments that Berlioz makes in the first chapter against the myth of Christ are very rational which in fact require a more rigorous intellectual effort to arrive to than accepting the christian narrative. So in fact I was really positively surprised to hear him make an argument against the divinity of Christ by referring to many other examples of people born to virigins only to be resurrected . This is a very modern , secular reasoning.
• The Pilate parrael story: I had a hard time trying to draw the parallel between the two stories. I don't think that it added anything to the main theme , in fact it caused great confusion until the very end as one could not see the obvious overarching narrative of cowardice marrying up the two stories.
• The hero of the story , the Master, is introduced way too late in the game and he doesn't have a big part in the story. There is so many other characters which are thrown around and I just don't understand why the character of the protagonist is so poorly developed without having a greater part in the story. In fact , while reading most of the top the novel , I thought Ivan to be the actual protagonist.
• And finally I just thought that there were too many characters, too many random events that just didn't come together in a coherent way to support the main themes of the novel. Yes the cat had it's moments, but I didn't think that he was as funny as some people perceive him to be, he probably sounds funnier in Russian.

Anyway , thanks for listening , love to get feedback and don't hold back I have a pretty thick skin :).