The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita
Book for October 2017
Group 3

The Master and Margarita is a satire of the Stalin period in the Soviet Union. The novel is by turns a searing satire of Soviet life, a religious allegory to rival Goethe’s Faust, and a carnivalesque fantasy. It is considered a 20th-century masterpiece.

The story juxtaposes two planes of action—one set in Moscow in the 1930s and the other in Jerusalem at the time of Christ. The three central characters of the contemporary plot are the Devil, disguised as one Professor Woland; the “Master,” a repressed novelist; and Margarita, who, though married to a bureaucrat, loves the Master. The Master, a Christ symbol, burns his manuscript and goes willingly into a psychiatric ward when critics attack his work. Margarita sells her soul to the Devil and becomes a witch in order to obtain the Master’s release. A parallel plot presents the action of the Master’s destroyed novel, the condemnation of Yeshua (Jesus) in Jerusalem.

Bulgakov worked on The Master and Margarita continuously from 1928 until his death in 1940. The Master and Margarita was published in a censored form in the Soviet Union in 1966–67. In 1966 the magazine Moskva published the first part of this book in its November issue. The story had circulated underground before. The unexpurgated version was published in the Soviet Union in 1973.

About the Author
Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (15 May 1891 – 10 March 1940) was a Russian writer, physician and playwright. His father and both of his grandfathers were clergymen. Bulgakov studied medicine and became a noted venerologist. During the First World War he was drafted into the Russian army and later into the Ukrainian People's Army as a doctor. He was a successful writer and especially playwright in the 1920ies but ran into increasing problems with the Soviet authorities until in 1929 the publication of his works and staging of his plays was prohibited. At the same time, because Stalin liked him, he avoided further prosecution. Except for The White Guard (1926) all of his major novels were published posthumously, beginning with the Master and Margarita in 1967.