The Master and Margarita
거장과 마르가리타
A novel written by Mikhail Bulgakov in 1928-1940. The devil Woland descends with his retinue on 1930s Moscow, wreaks havoc and rescues the Master, a writer broken for a novel about Pontius Pilate, and Margarita, who loves him. It went unpublished in the author's lifetime and first appeared in a journal in 1966-1967 with about 12 percent cut.
In depth
What is the story?
A May evening at the Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow. Berlioz, chairman of the writers' body Massolit, and the poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing Jesus Christ when a foreigner-like stranger joins in. He says he was on Pontius Pilate's balcony and predicts that Berlioz will have his head cut off by "a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl". Soon a tram does just that. The stranger is the devil Woland, with his retinue: Fagot-Koroviev, Azazello, the huge cat Behemoth and the maid Hella.
Woland moves into Berlioz's "bad apartment" and turns the city upside down. He sends a theatre director flying to Yalta, stages a black magic show exposing people's hypocrisy and makes office staff sing in compulsory chorus. Bezdomny, chasing them, ends up in a psychiatric clinic, where he meets the Master, a man who wrote a novel about Pilate, was savaged by critics and burned the manuscript.
The second half belongs to Margarita, childless, thirty, wife of "a very important specialist". Ready to pawn her soul to learn whether her lost lover lives, she is heard, and Azazello hands her a magic cream. She becomes a witch, flies over Moscow and reigns as queen at Satan's great ball. Woland returns the Master to her, along with the burned manuscript. "Manuscripts don't burn": the most famous line in the book.
Alongside runs another story. In the Master's novel, set in Yershalaim, the procurator Pilate interrogates the wandering philosopher Yeshua Ha-Notsri. He sees the man is a wandering philosopher and is intrigued by his claim that all power is violence, but cannot save him. Instead he orders the secret service chief Afranius to kill the traitor Judas. The two stories meet at the end. Yeshua's disciple Levi Matvei asks Woland to grant the Master and Margarita peace, and that night a group of riders leaves Moscow, the author of the novel and his beloved among them.
Why is it so loved?
Satire, fantasy, scripture and detective fiction share one book, which makes its genre hard to fix. Beneath lies the author's own life. In spring 1930, after his play The Cabal of Hypocrites was banned, Bulgakov burned his first draft of the "novel about the devil", as he told the Soviet government in a letter ten days later. That is the source of the burning scene. He began again two years later, noting on one sheet: "Help me, Lord, to write the novel." In the winter of 1940, bedridden, he went on correcting by dictation to his wife Yelena. The last change is dated 13 February; he died in March.
Soviet critics divided as well. When M. Gus attacked Vladimir Lakshin's praise of the Pilate scenes, Lakshin replied in Novy Mir no. 12, 1968, with "Manuscripts Don't Burn!", pointing out that Bulgakov's old critics are gathered in the book in the figure of Latunsky.
How did it reach the world?
His widow Yelena Bulgakova spent over twenty years preparing the text and trying to publish it. A 1940 selection never appeared; in 1946 a letter reached Stalin's secretary Poskryobyshev "through a dressmaker", but the attack on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad ended that hope. The Thaw opened the way. It ran in Moskva (no. 11, 1966, and no. 1, 1967), with a protective preface by Konstantin Simonov and some 14,000 words, about 12 percent, cut. The censors spoke of "non-class categories, obscurantism, sick fantasy". Posev in Frankfurt printed a 1969 edition with the cuts in italics, and the first Soviet book came only in 1973, with an official price of 1.53 rubles and a black-market one of 60 to 200.
Which text to read?
Since the author never finished it, no definitive text exists. The editions of Yelena Bulgakova, A. A. Saakyants (1973), Lidia Yanovskaya (1989-1990) and E. Yu. Kolysheva (2014) all differ.