The Devil Takes Moscow

I've been trying to figure out how to write about The Master and Margarita for a while now. It was the final title we read in the library book group this spring, and quite challenging. Fairly considered Bulgakov's unfinished masterwork, it's highly critical of Soviet society and thus wasn't published until 1966, 26 years after the author's death, and even then in a censored edition. Copies were circulated underground among members of the intellectual classes long before that.

Synopsis: One unseasonably warm April, a mysterious foreign magician, Wolland, arrives in Moscow. His retinue: a ghostly Master of Ceremonies with a cracked pince-nez; a vile, fanged demon-type; a large, talking black cat with a mean vodka habit; a naked witch. Hijinks ensue; then hysteria; then terror, as the foreigner turns out to be the very Devil, and a Moscow that has lost its ability to believe in either God or Satan must cope with a visitation by actual evil.

A leading literary figure is decapitated by a streetcar; a young poet is declared insane; a theater manager finds himself mysteriously transported to Yalta; Wolland's single magic performance rains chaos (and eventually fire) on the city. Meanwhile, in an autobiographical gesture on Bulgakov's part, a writer (The Master) whose finest work is an abandoned novel about Pontious Pilate, lives in ignominy, and his lover (Margarita) sells her soul to Wolland to assuage the Master's disgrace.

I have no hope of doing this justice - it's difficult to describe, and is something of a favorite among students of Russian literature, with its many layers of social commentary and political criticism and Christology and Faustian themes. The annotation provided in this 1995 translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is exquisite and enlightening. It's a piece that will surely deserve to be revisited.