The Master and Margarita

What It Is

A novel written in Moscow between 1928 and 1940 by a man with no realistic hope of publishing it. Bulgakov was a doctor turned playwright whose work the Soviet state had stopped staging. He burned a draft in 1930, began again, and was dictating corrections to his wife until shortly before his death.

Elena Bulgakova then kept the manuscript for twenty-six years. A cut version appeared in the magazine Moskva over the winter of 1966 and 1967, with roughly a tenth of the text removed; the missing passages were retyped and passed hand to hand. Soviet readers did not see the whole book until 1973.

What kind of novel it is takes some saying. Satire, farce, romance and something a good deal stranger share the same covers, and the register can change between one chapter and the next. The surface is enormous fun. The book underneath is not.

Why It Matters

This is the great novel of a police state, written inside one, by a man who knew exactly what he was risking. A line from it, manuscripts don't burn, became the private motto of every writer in the Soviet bloc who went on working for a drawer nobody would ever open.

Its method is why it outlived its moment. Bulgakov does not denounce the regime. He builds a fiction that forces a society organised around lying to react to something it cannot explain away, and simply watches what it does. Cowardice, the book says, is the worst of the vices. He had earned the right to the opinion.

The afterlife is unusually loud. Salman Rushdie has said The Satanic Verses would not exist without it. Marianne Faithfull gave a copy to Mick Jagger, and Sympathy for the Devil came out of the reading. In Russia it is less a classic than a cult, and people still leave messages in the stairwell of Bulgakov's old flat on Sadovaya Street.

Before You Read

About four hundred pages, ten to twelve hours, and it moves faster than that suggests. Nothing in the sentences will trouble you.

The difficulty is tonal. The register changes without warning, and a reader who insists on one key will be thrown every second chapter. Let it be several books at once.

A little context pays for itself. In 1930s Moscow an apartment was currency, a writers' union card was a livelihood, and people disappeared at night while their neighbours said nothing in the morning. Bulgakov assumes you know. Read the endnotes as you go, because most of the jokes are aimed at institutions that no longer exist.

Which Translation to Read

• Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin Classics, 1997) — recommended. Made from the full uncensored Russian, and the most alert to Bulgakov's changes of gear: where he snaps they snap, where he slows they settle. Their notes are the best in print and you will use them. The cost is their usual one. They keep Russian sentence logic even where English buckles under it, and a few sentences have to be read twice. View on Amazon →
• Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor (Vintage, 1995). The most confident English prose of the three, with a commentary by Ellendea Proffer that amounts to a short education in Soviet literary life. The cost: it warms the book up. Where Bulgakov is deadpan, Burgin and O'Connor are vivid, and some of the menace leaks out.
• Hugh Aplin (Alma Classics, 2008). Accurate, speakable and the best of the three read aloud, with sensible notes. The cost: lighter apparatus than Pevear and Volokhonsky, and the hardest of the three to find on a shelf.

Take Pevear and Volokhonsky for the complete text and the annotation, Burgin and O'Connor if you would rather be carried than instructed. Avoid Mirra Ginsburg's 1967 version: it was made from the censored magazine text and is missing material Bulgakov died writing.

The Folio Society issued the novel in 2010 with an introduction by Orlando Figes and illustrations by Peter Suart, using the Pevear and Volokhonsky text. The collectible and the reading edition are the same words here.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it fast the first time. It was written to be enjoyed, and readers who stop on every page to decode the allegory end up with neither the fun nor the meaning.

Pay attention to the way time moves. The book runs at more than one speed, and the relation between them is where Bulgakov keeps his real subject.

Read the introduction afterwards; most of them summarise. Then read it again in a year. This is one of the very few modern novels that is better the second time, because the first time you are laughing too hard to notice what it is doing to you.