Novel
The Master and Margarita
Мастер и Маргарита
Mikhail Bulgakov · 1967
Synopsis
One evening, at the Patriarch's Ponds in Moscow, the magazine editor Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny see a stranger join their conversation: Woland, who is none other than Satan, arrived in the Soviet capital with a strange retinue. These Moscow scenes are answered by a second narrative, the trial of Yeshua Ha-Nozri before Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, which is the novel of a writer called the Master, who is being treated in a clinic. Margarita, who loves him, in turn enters the story.
Context
Begun in 1928, the novel was burned by its author in 1930, after the banning of one of his plays, then taken up again; the final corrections date from February 1940. The review Moskva published it in 1966 and 1967 in a version cut by the censors; the first complete edition appeared abroad, and the Soviet Union printed the full text only in 1973. In French, André Markowicz and Françoise Morvan have produced a new translation.
Who it is for
A long novel with a double narrative, satirical and fantastical, which can be enjoyed without knowing the Moscow of the 1930s.
Prizes and reception
Published twenty-seven years after its author's death, it became his most famous work.
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