The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966
A novel Bulgakov wrote and burned, rewrote and hid for more than a decade, and never lived to see printed. It's at once a biting satire of 1930s Moscow, a love story of tremendous force, and a philosophical parable about Pontius Pilate, cowardice, and the cost of truth. Two storylines — the Moscow one, where the devil and his retinue roam the city, and the Yershalaim one, where the procurator of Judea passes sentence on a wandering philosopher — converge on a single conclusion: cowardice and betrayal of one's own conscience are always paid for, while true love and true art outlast any persecution.
Who it is for
For anyone ready for a novel without a single dull page: a devil who dispenses justice more honestly than people do, a love that goes all the way, and questions about cowardice, faith, and the price of truth that won't let go after the last line
Manuscripts don't burn.
What the book is about
Picture a May evening in Moscow at Patriarch's Ponds. Two writers are arguing about whether Jesus Christ ever existed — and suddenly a stranger appears beside them on the bench. He has a foreign accent, eyes of two different colors, and a cane topped with a poodle's head. He politely asks who, in their view, runs human life if there's no God. Within minutes, one of the arguers will die under the wheels of a tram — exactly as the stranger has just predicted. With this scene begins one of the strangest and most captivating novels of the 20th century.
The Master and Margarita is a book that doesn't fit entirely into any single genre. It's a satire of Soviet everyday life, in which the devil and his retinue spend several days mocking the cowardice, greed, and conformism of Muscovites. It's a vast love story, for whose sake a woman strikes a bargain with dark forces. And it's a philosophical novel within the novel — about Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, who once failed to find the courage to save an innocent man and paid for it with millennia of sleeplessness. Bulgakov wrote this book in secret, knowing it might never be published, and burned the first draft with his own hands. It outlived both him and the era that feared it — and in that sense proved prophetic by its very existence.
The world of the novel: a Moscow where faith has run out
The Moscow chapters take place in the late 1920s–early 1930s, in a city that is carefully convincing itself that there is no God, that miracles don't happen, and that everything inexplicable will sooner or later get a rational explanation. It's a world of communal apartments and housing committees, of literary functionaries who write not because they have something to say but because they belong to the right union, a world of denunciations, restaurant bustle, and a chronic shortage of money and living space — the notorious “housing question,” which, as the novel wryly notes, has spoiled Muscovites.
Bulgakov doesn't invent the fantastic for its own sake — he lets the devil into precisely this hollowed-out, self-assured world, because where there's no room left for belief in anything higher, a vacuum forms, and that vacuum is readily filled by whatever's at hand: fear, greed, informing, petty vanity. Woland and his retinue spend a few May days walking through Moscow as if across a stage where nothing needs to be invented — you only have to nudge the scenery slightly, and ordinary people expose their own vices.
The devil arrives not in a fairy-tale city but in a pointedly godless, self-satisfied one — and that's exactly why he has so much room to work with.
About the author
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891–1940) was a Russian writer and playwright, trained as a physician. He published little in his lifetime and was harshly attacked by the Soviet authorities; he wrote The Master and Margarita “for the drawer” from 1928 almost until his death, knowing the novel would likely never be published. It first appeared (in abridged form) only in 1966–67, a quarter century after the author's death, and immediately became one of the essential books of the 20th century.
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