The Master and Margarita
First edition
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| Author | Mikhail Bulgakov |
|---|---|
| Original title | Мастер и Маргарита |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Fantastic, farce, mysticism, romance, satire, Modernist literature |
| Publisher | YMCA Press |
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Publication date
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1966–67 (in serial form), 1967 (in single volume), 1973 (uncensored version) |
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Published in English
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1967 |
| Media type | Print (hard & paperback) |
| ISBN | (Penguin paperback) |
| OCLC | 37156277 |
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Ма́стер и Маргари́та) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written between 1928 and 1940, but unpublished in book form until 1967. The story concerns a visit by the devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, as well as the foremost of Soviet satires.
Bulgakov started writing the novel in 1928, but burned the first manuscript in 1930, seeing no future as a writer in the Soviet Union. He restarted the novel in 1931. In the early 1920s Bulgakov visited an atheistic-propaganda journal redaction meeting, which was transformed by Bulgakov into the Walpurgis Night ball of the novel. The second draft was completed in 1936, by which point all the major plot lines of the final version were in place. There would follow four other versions. Bulgakov stopped writing four weeks before his death in 1940, leaving the novel with some unfinished sentences and loose ends.
A censored version, with about 12 percent of the text removed and still more changed, was first published in Moscow magazine (no. 11, 1966 and no. 1, 1967). The YMCA Press in Paris, best celebrated for publishing the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published the first book edition. The text of all the omitted and changed parts, with indications of the places of modification, was printed and distributed by hand (in a dissident practice known as samizdat). In 1969, the publisher Posev (Frankfurt) printed a version produced with the aid of these inserts.
In the Soviet Union, the first complete version, prepared by Anna Saakyants, was published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973, based on the version completed at the beginning of 1940, as proofread by the publisher. This version remained the canonical edition until 1989, when the last version, based on all available manuscripts, was prepared by Lidiya Yanovskaya.
The novel alternates between two settings. The first is 1930s Moscow, where Satan appears at the Patriarch Ponds in the guise of "Professor" Woland, a mysterious gentleman "magician" of uncertain origin. He arrives with a retinue that includes the grotesquely dressed valet Koroviev; the mischievous, gun-happy, fast-talking black cat Behemoth; the fanged hitman Azazello; the pale-faced Abadonna; and the witch Hella. They wreak havoc targeting the literary elite and its trade union MASSOLIT. Its privileged HQ is Griboyedov's House and is made up of corrupt social climbers and their women (wives and mistresses alike), bureaucrats, profiteers, and, more generally, skeptical unbelievers in the human spirit.
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