Product Description

A mysterious stranger appears in a Moscow park. Soon he and his retinue have astonished the locals with the magic show to end all magic shows. But why are they really here, and what has it got to do with the beautiful Margarita, or her lover, the Master, a silenced writer? A carnival for the senses and a diabolical extravaganza, this most exuberant of Russian novels was staged in this adaptation at Chichester Festival Theatre.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147059 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-28
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Daily Telegraph, August 2, 2004
The Master and Margarita comes over like a grown-up and vastly superior version of Harry Potter.

Daily Telegraph, August 2, 2004
Outstanding adaptation...breathtaking in its ambition and originality...the literary range is extraordinary

The Guardian, July 31, 2004
An extraordinary mixture of Faustian romance, anti-Stalinist satire and religious enquiry.

Customer Reviews

What is so great about this book really?
Oh dear - everyone else seems to rave about this book, but I found it very difficult to read and have just decided to give up on it two thirds of the way through. Yes, there are some funny and disturbing scenes that kept me reading through those bits, but the beginning of the second part has killed off my waning interest. There are far better satires about Soviet life and it shouldn't need devils and witches to bring it off.

A Complex Fantasy
A novel written and set in 1930s Moscow, The Master and Margarita is a veiled criticism of the repression of artistic licence and religious expression under Stalinism. But you won't sense that immediately - instead, you'll be trying to work out how the three plots in the book have any relation to each other. The central theme is the Devil's visit to the city with his retinue of demons and witches; intent on an orgy of chaos, he sets about murdering some, banishing or frightening others, and creating an atmosphere in Moscow of disbelief and hysteria. If he is a depiction of Stalin, so the "Master" (a reclusive author of a novel about Pontius Pilate who has wound up in a lunatic asylum) and Margarita (his bold and hedonistic lover) may represent Bulgakov himself and his third wife, Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya. The third theme is the historical narrative of Pilate's judgement of Jesus - a story that is written by the Master but dreamt or imagined by other characters.
It's a difficult web of sheer fantasy, comic absurdity and references to real people whom Bulgakov knew and were either oppressors or the oppressed under Stalinism. But it's also about the power of narratives to restructure reality, and the struggle of writers like The Master (Bulgakov) not to be bowed into writing only what the authorities will permit. I'd argue that you don't need to be aware of the book's many references to enjoy it. Read it for what it is - a darkly comic tale where anything is possible (after all, Satan and his demons are directing the proceedings) - and don't bog yourself down with the references until a second or third reading. Instead immerse yourself in the novel's rich imagination, refusal to be realistic or dry, and biting satire of conformists. Recommended.

Caution: Hypnotists in Moscow!
That this book exists at all is a miracle, considering it was never published during Bulgakov's lifetime, and could easily have been destroyed in the censorship under Bolshevism (let us not be ignorant and refrain from calling it Communism, since that never really happened anywhere except perhaps in Yugoslavia under Tito). Indeed, that Bulgakov lived to write this book is perhaps more of a miracle, given his other satirical writings, such as the contumelious "Heart of the Dog" in which he literally called the Bulshevics dogs! Perhaps it was due to his earlier experiences and imprisonment that he chose to write Master and Margaritta on a more subtle level.

One of the main underlying themes of this book is atheism / the erosion of Christianity under Stalin - it is important even to atheists, in that it highlights the methodology of Stalin's control, effectively replacing the existence of God with himself, and how he achieved this through manipulating the media - hiring writers to produce defamatory articles about Christ (and also to erode Christ from new state releases of the bible, something which annoyed Bulgakov, himself a Christian, though its somewhat ironic that the Orthodox church found this work to be offensive!). And here starts the book, with two poets at a cafe, literary giants of the day, accustomed to atheist writing, debating the existence of Jesus, and then there appears before them a mysterious visitor to Moscow, the devil, who sets them straight - "so you don't believe in Jesus? And so the devil doesn't exist either?" And we are eventually brought to the ingenious chapter "Pontius Pilot", a story of the meeting between Jesus and Pontious Pilate, the latter being reluctant at first to crucify Christ (it is well known that the New Testament places the blame for Jesus' execution on Jewish quarters, rather than on the Romans). This is written with such depth, containing many ingenous devices, like switching between Hebrew, Greek and Latin names, and gems like how impressed Pilot was with Jesus' defence that in the end he wanted to save Jesus and kill the informant Judas instead! And after this fine tale the devil brings misfortune into the lives of the atheists. Thus it is not the devil who is the "Soviet purger" (as mentioned by somebody else here), if anything he is purging soviet purgers! He does bad things to bad people, which is precisely what the devil is supposed to do, right? But then he does good things to good people, such as reuniting Margaritta with the Master - the writer into whom Bulgakov interjected himself and his favorite author Gogol, who went slightly mad and burnt parts of his manuscript for Dead Souls in real life. And in the parallel thread of the book, he reunites Pontius Pilate with Jesus, so they may continue their interesting philosophical discussions - so this is a good devil after all, sorry to give the game away a little (I do mean little).

The temporal parallels are yet another interesting aspect of the book - the past is painted by Bulgakov with clarity and realism, whilst "modern day" Moscow is painted in an unbelievable, mad light - as Bulgakov made clear in his earlier writings, the Bulshevics were wreaking havoc in Russia, although here the madness is wreaked by the "foreign visitors". The state's explanation of all this madness, in denial of supernatural activities, (in real life the Bulshevics banned anything to do with the supernatural), was to say that there was some mass hypnotism by a group of "foreigners" - and even the people who experienced these mad events accepted the state explantion - a satire on the way in which official explanations were accepted by people in real life, no matter the reality of what they had just experienced.

This is by no means a summary of the book, it is impossible to write a summary of such a text, which has formed the subject for a number of phd studies and other analytical works. There are some excellent resources on this book, perhaps the best is the highly informed website by Kevin Moss at Middlebury College (just google this along with Master and Margaritta) - in which you will find many explanations not included in the end notes of this translation. That is not to say that this book cannot be enjoyed without being informed of every little detail - indeed it is best to read this book first without any reference at all, and perhaps no knowledge of Russia's past, and just enjoy it for the story it tells. You will want to read it again an again, to get to the bottom of it, referring to the notes and discovering all the layers where the more subtle satire elements come in.

This particular translation is very helpful for its notes at the back of the book, explaining those subtle points (and some not-so subtle, but only obvious if you were a Russian living at that time!). A very small minority of people here complain about some of the spelling / use of English in comparison to the Glenny translation, but if anything this translation has fewer mistakes / better grammar, e.g. "checked cap" vs "check cap" (the latter appears in Glenny's translation). I think the real issue is down to the prose carried across in the translation - on this front Glenny's translation is better, whilst this translation reads slightly awkwardly, where it seems more effort was made in getting the detail right rather than making it flow naturally. So my advice would be to get both translations, read Glenny's first, then read this with the useful notes, to help reveal the intricate details - after all this book is a work of genius.