The Master and Margarita
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This uncensored translation of Bulgakov's posthumously published masterpiece of black magic and black humor restores its sliest digs and sharpest jabs at Stalin's regime, which suppressed it. Writing in a punning, soaring prose thick with contemporary historical references and political irony, Bulgakov (1891-1940) did not make things easy for future translators. The story itself is demanding: the arrival of the Devil and his entourage in Stalin's Moscow frames a Faustian tale of a suppressed writer (the Master) and his devoted lover (his Margarita), set against a realistic narrative?the Master's rejected manuscript?of Pontius Pilate's police state in Jerusalem. An immediate contemporary classic when it was first serialized in Moscow in censored form in 1967-68, the novel suffered in its previous English translations, which were either incomplete or stylistically loose. This new translation, with its accuracy and depth, finally does justice to the politically and verbally outrageous qualities of the original. Careful footnotes explain and contextualize Bulgakov's dense allusions to, and in-jokes about, life under Stalin.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
This annotated version of Bulgakov's 1966 novel in which the devil pays a visit to Moscow is translated from the most accurate Russian sources. This edition also contains notes on the text.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"One of the truly great Russian novels of [the twentieth] century."
—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative,
and poignant . . . A great work."
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a soaring, dazzling novel; an extraordinary fusion of wildly disparate elements. It is a concerto played simultaneously on the organ, the bagpipes, and a pennywhistle, while someone sets off fireworks between the players' feet."
—NEW YORK TIMES
"Fine, funny, imaginative . . . The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative."
—NEWSWEEK
"A wild surrealistic romp . . . Brilliantly flamboyant and outrageous."
—Joyce Carol Oates
"Sparkling, enchanting, funny, deeply serious and sometimes baffling . . . [The Master and Margarita is] a liberating, exuberant social and political satire combined with a profound moral and political allegory . . . A bravura performance of truly heroic virtuosity, a carnival of the imagination."
—from the Introduction by Simon Franklin
From the Hardcover edition.
—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative,
and poignant . . . A great work."
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a soaring, dazzling novel; an extraordinary fusion of wildly disparate elements. It is a concerto played simultaneously on the organ, the bagpipes, and a pennywhistle, while someone sets off fireworks between the players' feet."
—NEW YORK TIMES
"Fine, funny, imaginative . . . The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative."
—NEWSWEEK
"A wild surrealistic romp . . . Brilliantly flamboyant and outrageous."
—Joyce Carol Oates
"Sparkling, enchanting, funny, deeply serious and sometimes baffling . . . [The Master and Margarita is] a liberating, exuberant social and political satire combined with a profound moral and political allegory . . . A bravura performance of truly heroic virtuosity, a carnival of the imagination."
—from the Introduction by Simon Franklin
From the Hardcover edition.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian
Original Language: Russian
From the Publisher
This is the first translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov's exuberant comic masterpiece, and the first annotated edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
A literary sensation from its first publication, The Master and Margarita has become an astonishing publishing phenomenon in Russia and has been translated into more than twenty languages, and made into plays and films. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is now considered one of the seminal works of twentieth-century Russian literature. In this imaginative extravaganza the devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic resuits of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the capital of world atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital. Margarita, the despairing and daring heroine, becomes a witch in an effort to save the Master, and agrees to become the devil's hostess at his annual spring ball.
By turns acidly satiric, fantastic, and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first-century Jerusalem. In a brilliant tour de force, Bulgakov provides a startlingly different version of Pontius Pilate's encounter with one Yeshua, a naive believer in the goodness of man. The interplay of these two narratives is part of the ingenious pleasure of this work which defies all genre classifications and expectations.
The commentary and afterword provide new insight into the mysterious subtexts of the novel, and here, for the first time, The Master and Margarita is revealed in all its complexity.
Diana Burgin is Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Chairperson of the Modern Language Department. Her book, Sophia Parnok: The Life and Work of Russia's Sappho was published in 1996. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891, the son of a professor of theology. Medicine, religion, and education were the dominant careers in his family. Politically, the family appears to have belonged to the liberal monarchist camp. Despite an early interest in literature and the theater, Bulgakov chose to become a doctor. In 1914, as a medical student, he volunteered with the Red Cross during World War I. After graduating from the University of Kiev in 1916, he served in the White Army during the Civil War, and was subsequently drafted by the Ukrainian Nationalist Army. These experiences during the chaos of the Civil War in Kiev and the Caucasus would have a profound effect on the writer and his work. His two younger brothers disappeared during the fighting around Kiev, and later surfaced in Europe. In 1919, while in the Caucasus, he made the decision to leave medicine for literature; soon after he almost emigrated, but was prevented from doing so by illness. By 1921 he was in Moscow where his literary career began in earnest. The Diaboliad collection, published in 1925, was his major publication of this time, since his masterpiece, Heart of a Dog, could not get past the censorship. This same period saw the partial publication of his novel about Kiev during the Civil War, White Guard. Publication ceased when the journal serializing the novel was shut down; however, enough had come out to arouse the interest of the Moscow Art Theater, which commissioned a play based on White Guard. This play, Days of the Turbins, was the source of Bulgakov's fame for the rest of his life, and was a major sensation both due to its vivid characterizations and its portrayal of a monarchist family in a sympathetic light rather than as monsters, which was the norm at this time. By the late twenties, when he had a number of other plays in production (Zoya's Apartment, Flight and The Crimson Island), Bulgakov had drawn down the wrath of the critics who felt that everything he wrote was essentially anti-Soviet. This was a period of extreme polarization, and Bulgakov's career was destroyed by 1929. He would have one more original play, Moliere, staged in his lifetime (but it was quickly withdrawn from production due to the critics), but all publication of his prose ceased after 1927. In 1930 he wrote his famous letter to Stalin, defending his right to be a satirist, and asking that his country let him emigrate if it could not find any use for his talents. Stalin, who had actually seen Days of the Turbins many times, answered this letter with a phone call, and soon afterward Bulgakov had employment with a small theater. The Moscow Art Theater then found work for him, but most of the projects he worked on came to nothing, and the last eight years of his life were full of stress and disappointment. He broke with Stanislavsky and the Art Theater after the Moliere debacle, and began to write Theatrical Novel as a way of venting his spleen. From 1928 on, Bulgakov had worked only sporadically on his major work, The Master and Margarita; in 1937 he dropped Theatrical Novel, which would remain unfinished, and concentrated on the novel about the devil in Moscow. When he died of sclerosis of the kidneys (which had killed his father at the same age) in 1940, he had finished The Master and Margarita, but had not completed final editing corrections. This novel, which would be considered one of the best Russian novels of the twentieth century, was not published until 1966-67 (and then in censored form), twenty-six years after Bulgakov's death. Heart of a Dog, however, was not published until 1987, the height of glasnost under Gorbachev--more than sixty years after it was written--a true indication of just how threatening satire could be to a totalitarian regime. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence
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