Mikhail Bulgakov, Will Self (Introducer), Michael Glenny (Translator)

The Master and Margarita

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Summary

in Bulgakov's allegorical masterpiece of Stalin’s regime the devil is making a personal appearance in Moscow.

He is accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order are in disarray. Only the Master, a writer and a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil’s onslaught.

‘Stunning, superb...Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest’ Independent

‘A masterpiece – a classic of twentieth-century fiction’ New York Times

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GLENNY, INTRODUCED BY WILL SELF

Reviews

This book is absorbing, brilliant slapstick, and looks deep in to the heart of fantasy and longing
Sunday Times

About the author

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916, but gave up the practice of medicine in 1920 to devote himself to literature. In 1925 he completed the satirical novella The Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. This was one of the many defeats he was to suffer at the hands of his censors. By 1930 Bulgakov had become so frustrated by the political atmosphere and the suppression of his works that he wrote to Stalin begging to be allowed to emigrate if he was not to be given the opportunity to make his living as a writer in the USSR. Stalin telephoned him personally and offered to arrange a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre instead. In 1938, a year before contracting a fatal illness, he completed his prose masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. He died in 1940. In 1966-7, thanks to the persistance of his widow, the novel made a first, incomplete, appearance in Moskva, and in 1973 appeared in full.

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