The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
he devil visits Soviet Moscow. Nobody notices.
For you if
you want satire so good the regime couldn't publish it for thirty years after the author died
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The devil arrives in Stalin's Moscow with a retinue of bizarre companions and exposes Soviet society's greed, cowardice, and bureaucratic absurdity through a series of increasingly chaotic encounters. Woven through it is a parallel narrative about Pontius Pilate and Jesus. Bulgakov wrote this knowing it would never be published in his lifetime — his wife hid the manuscript. It finally appeared in 1966, twenty-six years after his death. The most joyful and devastating Russian dispatch ever written. The laugh that survived everything the 20th century threw at it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Russia • Eastern Europe
- Voice
- Written by a Russian author
- Themes
- censorshipsatire
- Topics
- stalinism
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