The Master and Margarita

What The Master and Margarita is about

One spring evening in 1930s Moscow, two writers sitting at Patriarch's Ponds are arguing that Jesus never existed when a mysterious foreign professor of black magic joins them. He is Woland, the Devil, and within minutes one of the writers is dead under a tram, exactly as Woland predicted. Woland and his entourage, which includes a giant talking black cat named Behemoth, the ex-choirmaster Koroviev and the fanged assassin Azazello, spend the next days creating chaos among Moscow's bureaucrats, writers and theatregoers, exposing their greed and cowardice. Meanwhile a writer known only as the Master, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate and been hounded into a psychiatric clinic by critics, is loved by Margarita, who agrees to become the hostess of Satan's ball to win him back. Chapters from the Master's novel, about Pilate's judgment of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, are woven through the book.

The novel is at once a comedy, a satire of Soviet life, a love story and a meditation on cowardice, power and forgiveness. Woland's line that "manuscripts don't burn" became a famous phrase among Soviet readers.

The ban, in full

Bulgakov worked on the novel from 1928 until his death in 1940, at a time when most of his work was banned from publication and performance. In 1930 he burned an early draft. He knew the novel could not be published, and his widow, Yelena Sergeyevna Bulgakova, kept the manuscript for more than twenty-five years. A version cut by about an eighth, with passages mocking Soviet institutions removed, finally appeared in the Moscow magazine Moskva in 1966 and 1967. The removed passages circulated in typed samizdat copies, and the full text was published abroad in 1969. A complete edition was published in the Soviet Union in 1973.

About Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) was born in Kyiv and trained as a doctor before turning to writing. His play The Days of the Turbins, about a family of White officers in the civil war, was a hit at the Moscow Art Theatre and was reportedly seen many times by Stalin; but critics attacked him and his other works were banned. In 1930 he wrote to the government asking to be allowed to emigrate or to work, and Stalin telephoned him personally; he was given a job at the theatre but never allowed to leave. His satirical novella Heart of a Dog was not published in the USSR until 1987.

Which edition to read

Popular English translations include those by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin), Michael Glenny, and Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Translations made before the 1970s may be based on the censored text.

Reception and legacy

The novel became a sensation in the Soviet Union and is now one of the most loved Russian novels of the twentieth century. It has been adapted for film, television and stage many times, most recently in a 2024 Russian film.

Questions

Why was The Master and Margarita banned?

Its satire of Soviet bureaucracy, literary officials and the secret police, and its religious themes, made it unpublishable under Stalin.

Is it still banned?

No. More: books banned in the Soviet Union, Doctor Zhivago.