The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil arrives in Stalin's Moscow with a retinue that includes a giant talking cat, while a parallel narrative follows Pontius Pilate's interrogation of Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Bulgakov wrote it between 1928 and 1940 and never saw it published; a censored version ran in the magazine Moskva across 1966 and 1967 with about twelve per cent of the text removed, and the first complete book edition appeared in Paris in 1967. The link is the Penguin Classics Deluxe fiftieth anniversary edition in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.
Why you should read this
Bulgakov's satire of Soviet literary and bureaucratic life, suppressed for decades and published only after his death, blending grotesque comedy with a serious theological thread. Standard reference point for twentieth-century Russian fiction and for novels that mix satire with the fantastic.
- Field
- Literature
- Form
- Fiction
- Published
- 1967
- Themes
- Russian LiteratureLiterature
