The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Summary
The devil, calling himself Professor Woland, arrives in 1930s Moscow with a retinue that includes a talking black cat named Behemoth, and sets about exposing the corruption and cowardice of the city's official literary establishment, MASSOLIT, through a string of increasingly surreal set pieces, a magic show that leaves audience members half undressed in the street, a bureaucrat's head severed by a tram exactly as Woland had predicted. A poet named Ivan Bezdomny, driven half mad by what he witnesses, ends up in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets the Master, a novelist whose manuscript about Pontius Pilate's reluctant, guilt ridden condemnation of Yeshua Ha Notsri was rejected and burned, though the Master insists manuscripts do not burn. Margarita, the Master's devoted lover, strikes a bargain with Woland, becoming the supernatural hostess of his elaborate midnight ball in exchange for the Master's return. In the novel's close, Woland grants the couple peace rather than the light Yeshua receives, and the Master, in a final act completing his own unfinished novel, releases the fictional Pilate from his two thousand years of guilt, while Moscow itself, once Woland departs, explains away everything that happened as mass hysteria.
Bulgakov braids the Moscow chapters and the ancient Jerusalem chapters together across the same five days, and the book moves between broad comic set pieces and passages of real tenderness without ever losing its footing, satire, fantasy and theology all working the same page. It rewards patience with its structure and remains, even in translation, one of the funniest serious novels on this list.
Bulgakov worked on the novel from 1928 until his death in 1940, revising it through multiple drafts he never lived to see published in any form.
Historical Context & Significance
No prize could have recognized The Master and Margarita in its own time; Bulgakov died in 1940, more than a quarter century before any version of the book reached a reader, and Soviet publishing had no mechanism for honoring a manuscript that officially did not exist. The literary magazine Moskva finally serialized it in November 1966 and January 1967, censored by roughly twelve percent, with entire passages removed or altered, and an uncensored manuscript had by then already been smuggled to Paris, where YMCA Press, the émigré publisher that would later bring out Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's banned Gulag Archipelago, issued the first complete book edition in 1967.
The first complete Russian edition to appear inside the Soviet Union came only in 1973, prepared by the editor Anna Sahakyants from Bulgakov's own final 1940 manuscript and published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, and it remained the standard Soviet text until 1989. Samizdat readers had already restored many of the censored passages years earlier from a 1969 Frankfurt edition. The novel is now widely read as one of the great Soviet satires, cited by Salman Rushdie as a direct influence on The Satanic Verses and named to Le Monde's list of the hundred books of the century, recognition that arrived only because Bulgakov's widow refused for decades to let the manuscript disappear.