Title: The Master and Margarita Author: Mikhail Bulgakov Creation Date: 1928-1940 (written); 1966-1967 (first publication) Location: Russia (Moscow)
Summary
The Devil arrives in Stalinist Moscow in the guise of Professor Woland, accompanied by a retinue that includes a giant talking cat, a fanged assassin, and a naked witch. Chaos erupts: literary bureaucrats are driven mad, money rains from theatre ceilings, apartments are set ablaze. Interwoven with this satanic carnival are two other narratives: the story of the Master, an unnamed writer whose novel about Pontius Pilate has been suppressed by Soviet literary authorities, and his beloved Margarita, who makes a deal with the Devil to save him; and the embedded novel itself, retelling the crucifixion of Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus) from Pilate's perspective. The three storylines converge in a finale that grants the Master and Margarita not light but peace.
Why This Book Matters
The Master and Margarita is the great novel of life under totalitarianism — not a documentary account like Solzhenitsyn's, but a fantastic, comic, heartbreaking parable about what happens to art, love, and truth when the state claims absolute power over reality itself. Bulgakov wrote it in secret over twelve years, knowing it could never be published in his lifetime (it appeared only in 1966–1967, twenty-six years after his death). The novel's recurring moral insight is that cowardice is among the deepest of human vices, because fear makes collaboration, betrayal, and self-betrayal possible. That claim runs through the Pilate chapters and through the Moscow satire alike. Its survival and eventual publication is itself a testament to the power of literature to outlast the regimes that suppress it.
Historical Context
Bulgakov began writing the novel in 1928 and continued revising it until his death in 1940, during the worst years of Stalin's terror. His plays had been banned, his manuscripts confiscated, and he lived in a state of creative imprisonment — allowed to exist but forbidden to publish. The novel's depiction of Moscow's literary establishment (MASSOLIT, the writers' housing committee) is a barely veiled satire of Soviet literary bureaucracy, patronage, and censorship, including the institutions that organised writers' professional lives. The Pontius Pilate narrative reimagines the Gospels with a psychological realism that was doubly transgressive in an officially atheist state.
Literary Significance
The novel's three interlocking narratives — Moscow satire, love story, and biblical retelling — create a structure of dizzying formal ambition. Bulgakov's tone shifts from broad farce to philosophical gravity to lyrical tenderness, sometimes within a single page. The Moscow chapters draw on the Russian satirical tradition (Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin) while the Pilate chapters have a spare, almost cinematic realism. The novel's treatment of the Devil as a figure of justice rather than evil — Woland punishes liars and cowards, not sinners — inverts Christian theology with a boldness that recalls Goethe's Mephistopheles. The book became a cult phenomenon in the Soviet Union and remains one of the most beloved novels of the 20th century.
Research Notes
Essential for the Russian segment and for 20th-century literature. The novel provides a necessary counterpoint to the 19th-century Russian giants (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) by showing what happened to the Russian literary tradition under Soviet tyranny. The Glenny translation captures the novel's energy; the Pevear-Volokhonsky is more faithful. The novel is highly accessible and entertaining — a good entry point for readers intimidated by Russian literature.
The Reading
Part One: The Devil Comes to Moscow
On a hot spring evening, two literary men sat on a bench at Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow. One was Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the foremost Moscow literary associations, known by the acronym MASSOLIT. He was lecturing the young poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov — who wrote under the pseudonym Homeless — on the necessity of writing an anti-religious poem about Jesus Christ: not merely depicting Jesus as a flawed human being, but demonstrating that Jesus had never existed at all. This was the correct Soviet line on religion, and Berlioz delivered it with the comfortable authority of a man who had never questioned an official position in his life.
A stranger sat down beside them. He was tall, wore an expensive grey suit, and carried a walking stick with a black knob in the shape of a poodle's head. One eye was green, the other black. He introduced himself as Professor Woland, a specialist in black magic, and he entered the conversation with the politeness of a man who has all the time in the world.
"But allow me to ask you," said the stranger, "if there is no God, then who, one wonders, rules the life of man and keeps the world in order?"
"Man rules himself," Berlioz answered.
"But in order to rule, one must have a precise plan for at least a reasonable period of the future," the stranger objected. "Tell me, how can man rule if he is not only unable to make a plan for some laughably short period — say, a thousand years — but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow?"
And then, with exquisite precision, Woland predicted that Berlioz would have his head cut off that very evening by a Russian woman. Berlioz laughed. And then, crossing the road to reach the tram stop, he slipped on oil spilled by a girl named Annushka and fell under a streetcar. The tram severed his head.
The Devil had arrived in Moscow.
Woland's Retinue
Woland did not come alone. His entourage was magnificent in its grotesquerie.
There was Koroviev, also called Fagot, a tall, thin man in a jockey's cap, who served as Woland's master of ceremonies and chief mischief-maker. There was Azazello, a short, broad-shouldered man with a wall eye and a fang protruding from his mouth, who handled the violent business of the group with workmanlike efficiency. There was Hella, a naked red-haired witch.
And there was Behemoth — a cat the size of a pig who walked on his hind legs, drank vodka, rode the Moscow streetcar system, and possessed a talent for gunplay and sarcasm that made him the most memorable character in the novel. "Don't pick on me," Behemoth told a streetcar conductor who demanded his fare. "I am not a passenger. I am a cat."
This retinue descended upon Moscow like a plague of ironic justice. Woland took up residence in the apartment of the late Berlioz and set about exposing the corruption, cowardice, and venality of Soviet Moscow's cultural elite.
The Black Magic Show
The centrepiece of the Moscow chaos was a performance of black magic at the Variety Theatre. Koroviev, serving as master of ceremonies, announced a demonstration of black magic followed by an exposé of said magic.
What followed was pandemonium. Money rained from the ceiling — real Soviet roubles, or so they appeared — and the audience scrambled to collect them. Behemoth tore off the head of the theatre's compere (it was later reattached). A women's clothing store materialised on stage, offering Parisian fashions, and the women of Moscow rushed to exchange their Soviet dresses for French couture.
The show was a test, and Moscow failed it. The greed, the pettiness, the willingness to abandon all dignity for money and clothes — Woland observed it all with cool amusement. "They're people like any other people," he remarked. "They love money, but that has always been so... Mercy sometimes knocks at their hearts... ordinary people, rather like the former ones... only the housing shortage has spoiled them."
The next morning, the money turned to plain paper. The Parisian dresses vanished, leaving their wearers in their underclothes on the streets of Moscow.
Pontius Pilate
Woven through the Moscow narrative was another story — the novel the Master had written, the novel that had destroyed his career, which Bulgakov presented as though it were historical truth revealed to the reader.
In Jerusalem, on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, sat in judgement over a wandering philosopher named Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Pilate was suffering from a migraine. The sunlight hurt his eyes. He wanted nothing more than to be done with the whole business.
Yeshua was brought before him, barefoot and bruised from his arrest. He was not the commanding figure of Christian tradition — he was small, frightened, and spoke with a Galilean accent. But he said something that stopped Pilate cold. He said: "Cowardice is the most terrible of vices."
Pilate recognised the truth of this statement with the clarity of a man who was about to prove it. He understood that Yeshua was innocent. He even liked him. He tried, briefly and halfheartedly, to save him. But the high priest Kaifa demanded execution, the crowd demanded execution, and Pilate was afraid. Afraid for his career, afraid of Rome, afraid of the political consequences of mercy.
He confirmed the death sentence. Yeshua was executed on Bald Mountain. Pilate, watching from his palace, knew he had committed the one unforgivable sin: he had betrayed truth out of cowardice. And then he sat in his palace, with his faithful dog Banga at his feet, and dreamed of walking a moonlit path with the philosopher, arguing about truth and cowardice, and in the dream they agreed on everything.
But the dream ended, and Pilate remained awake, and the philosopher was dead.
Bulgakov's Pilate chapters were written in prose of spare, luminous intensity — utterly different from the farcical energy of the Moscow scenes. Here was the biblical story stripped of divinity and miracle, reduced to its human core: a powerful man confronting truth, recognising it, and choosing comfort over conscience. In both Pilate's Jerusalem and Stalin's Moscow, the machinery of the state demanded complicity, and the price of refusal was destruction.
Part Two: Margarita
Margarita had not forgotten the Master. She had spent months in torment, haunting the streets near his basement apartment, searching for any trace of him. When Azazello appeared to her and offered her a jar of miraculous cream, she accepted without hesitation. She knew she was making a deal with dark powers. She did not care. Love had made her reckless, and recklessness was, in Bulgakov's moral universe, a form of courage.
The cream transformed her. She flew naked over Moscow on a broom, laughing with savage joy, smashing the windows of the literary critic who had destroyed the Master's career. Then she was led to apartment No. 50, where Woland waited.
Woland needed a hostess for his annual spring ball — Satan's ball, the grandest event in the infernal calendar — and the hostess was required to be named Margarita and to be a woman of the city. Margarita agreed to serve, on the implicit understanding that Woland would grant her a wish afterward.
The ball was a phantasmagoria. Through the doors of apartment No. 50 — which had expanded into an impossible succession of ballrooms, tropical forests, and swimming pools filled with champagne — streamed the dead: poisoners, murderers, the damned of every century and every nation. Margarita stood at the foot of a staircase and greeted each one as an endless procession of the wicked kissed her hand. It was an ordeal of endurance and grace, and she bore it without complaint.
When it was over, Woland asked her wish. Margarita impulsively asked for mercy for another woman, Frieda, one of the damned souls at the ball who had been tormented for centuries for killing her infant child. Woland granted it, but pointed out that Margarita had wasted her wish on a stranger. "Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you have nothing to ask for yourself?"
But this was a test, and Margarita had passed it. By choosing mercy over self-interest, she had proven herself worthy. Woland returned the Master to her. Behemoth even produced the burned manuscript from somewhere — "manuscripts don't burn," Woland remarked — and the novel about Pontius Pilate was restored.
Peace
The Master and Margarita were reunited, but not for the life they had known before. The Master was broken. He could not return to Moscow, to the literary world that had destroyed him, to the pretence of normality in an insane society. And Margarita, having flown over Moscow as a witch, having hosted Satan's ball, having seen the truth about the world from the Devil's vantage point, could not return to her former life either.
Woland offered them something else. Not heaven — neither the Master nor Margarita had earned the light, whatever that meant. But peace. A small house with a garden, candles burning in the windows, Schubert on the gramophone, and no more fear.
Yeshua sent his disciple Levi Matvei to ask Woland for this favour. The Good and the Devil negotiated over the fate of two human beings with the courtesy of old colleagues who have long since agreed to divide the territory between them. "He has read the Master's writings," Levi Matvei said of Yeshua, "and asks that you take the Master with you and reward him with peace."
And Pilate? Pilate was finally released from the moonlit terrace where he had sat for two thousand years, tormented by the memory of his cowardice. The Master freed the Procurator with a word: "You are free! Free! He is waiting for you!" And Pilate rose and walked the moonbeam path toward the figure of Yeshua, and they argued about truth as they walked, and this time the argument would never end, and this time Pilate would never betray him.
Moscow went on. The literary bureaucrats replaced the destroyed ones. The apartments were reassigned. Official explanations were issued for the disturbances: mass hypnosis, foreign agents, coincidence. The system absorbed the Devil's visit the way it absorbed everything — by denying it had happened. Only Ivan Homeless, the former poet turned professor of history, remembered. Once a year, on the night of the spring full moon, he dreamed of Pontius Pilate walking a moonbeam path, and a woman leading a man by the hand toward a small house with candles in the windows.
The manuscripts that had been burned were still not burned, and the truth that had been suppressed was still, somewhere, waiting.
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The two standard English translations are Michael Glenny's (Harvill, 1967), which captures the novel's energy and dark comedy, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's (Penguin, 2016), which is more faithful to the Russian text.
By Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The most faithful English translation — rigorous, complete, and with useful notes.
By Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny. The older translation — captures the novel's farcical energy and dark comedy with particular vividness.
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