The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita, novel by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, written in 1928–40 and published in a censored form in the Soviet Union in 1966–67. The unexpurgated version was published there in 1973. Witty and ribald, the novel is at the same time a penetrating philosophical work that wrestles with profound and eternal problems of good and evil. It is considered a 20th-century masterpiece.

The novel juxtaposes two planes of action—one set in Moscow in the 1930s and the other in Jerusalem at the time of Christ. The three central characters of the contemporary plot are the Devil, disguised as one Professor Woland; the “Master,” a repressed novelist; and Margarita, who, though married to a bureaucrat, loves the Master. The Master, a Christ symbol, burns his manuscript and goes willingly into a psychiatric ward when critics attack his work. Margarita sells her soul to the Devil and becomes a witch in order to obtain the Master’s release. A parallel plot presents the action of the Master’s destroyed novel, the condemnation of Yeshua (Jesus) in Jerusalem.

Bulgakov began writing The Master and Margarita in 1928 and continued to work on it until shortly before his death in 1940. Few knew of the existence of the manuscript until 1966, when the first part of the novel, heavily censored, was published in the monthly magazine Moskva; the second installment appeared the following year. The Master and Margarita is now recognized as one of the finest achievements in 20th-century Russian literature. Sentences from the novel have inspired Russian proverbs; “Manuscripts don’t burn” and “Cowardice is the most terrible of vices” have a special resonance for the generations who endured the worst of Soviet totalitarianism. The novel’s influence can be detected further afield—from Salman Rushdie to the Rolling Stones (“Sympathy for the Devil” is said to have been inspired by Bulgakov).

By turns a searing satire of Soviet life, a religious allegory to rival Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and an untamed burlesque fantasy, this is a novel of laughter and terror, of freedom and bondage—a novel that blasts open “official truths” with the force of a carnival out of control.