The Master and Margarita

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

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In Moscow, truth needs a little help from the devil.

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

He is accompanied by a strange retinue of demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. As they move through the city, order gives way to chaos: the asylums fill, officials lose control and the forces of law are left bewildered.

At the centre of the novel are the Master, a writer devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman who loves him. Against the absurdity, terror and moral compromise around them, their loyalty becomes one of the few powers able to answer the devil’s onslaught.

Behind the demonic spectacle is a novel about what survives when public life is ruled by fear. Bulgakov writes with dazzling comic freedom, but his deepest concern is serious: the courage to love, to imagine and to tell the truth.

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL GLENNY, INTRODUCED BY WILL SELF

‘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

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

About 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 In 1925 he completed the satirical novella The Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987.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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