The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov completed The Master and Margarita in the late 1930s, as Stalin’s Terror was at its height, and the novel was not published until 1967-decades after his death, in a censored version, in a Soviet Union that had already destroyed one version of the manuscript and would not have permitted the full version. Its eventual publication in the West, and its gradual emergence in Russia, created a cult around it that has only grown: it is widely regarded as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.

The novel operates on two interlocking levels. In contemporary Moscow, the devil-Woland-arrives with his retinue to cause havoc among the Soviet bureaucratic and artistic establishment, exposing venality, corruption, and cowardice with a precision that reads as political satire of extraordinary courage. Simultaneously, in a parallel narrative set in ancient Judea, Pontius Pilate interrogates a man called Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Jesus) and makes the decision that will haunt him forever.

Bulgakov’s achievement is to make these two narratives mutually illuminating: the Pilate chapters are a serious theological meditation on the nature of cowardice and power; the Moscow chapters are a savage comedy in which Soviet materialism is revealed as superstition of a kind that should not have survived the arrival of actual supernatural beings. The comedy is dazzling-Behemoth the gun-toting cat, the operetta fiasco, the foreign currency shop-and never entirely stops being terrifying.

The novel’s love story, between the Master and Margarita, is the most romantic element in a work of fierce intelligence. That romance reaches across death itself is Bulgakov’s final, defiant assertion of the power of love and art against totalitarian erasure.