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What it argues
The Master and Margarita is structured as a double narrative: one set in Moscow in the 1930s, where a figure named Woland (who is Satan) arrives with a retinue of demons and wreaks havoc on the Soviet literary and cultural establishment; and one set in Jerusalem around the time of the Crucifixion, where Pontius Pilate interrogates a wandering philosopher named Yeshua. The two storylines circle each other and eventually converge. The novel was written in secret during the Stalinist terror, never submitted for publication in Bulgakov's lifetime, and first published — in censored form — in 1966, over twenty-five years after his death.
What the novel is actually about is harder to compress. It's a satire of Soviet bureaucracy and cultural control, but the satire is funny and specific rather than allegorical and heavy-handed: the particular texture of communal apartments, literary unions, theatrical productions, and corrupt housing officials is rendered with the precision of someone who lived inside it for decades. It's also a love story, in which Margarita makes a pact with the devil to save the manuscript of the man she loves. And it's a philosophical exploration of cowardice — the Pilate sections return repeatedly to the question of what happens to a person who knows what is right and chooses not to act, and the novel's final lines are among the most haunting in twentieth-century fiction.
What it gets right
- 1.
Woland's function is not simply evil — he exposes the cowardice, greed, and bad faith already present in the people he encounters, acting as a diagnostic instrument rather than a tempter.
- 2.
The Pilate sections function as a mirror for the main narrative: both involve a figure with power who chooses expediency over what they know to be just, and both pay the price for that choice across centuries.
- 3.
Cowardice is the novel's central sin. Pilate's failure to act on his private conviction is the wound that never heals; the Soviet characters' failures are its comic descendants.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) was a Russian novelist, playwright, and physician who spent most of his adult life under Soviet censorship, watching his plays pulled from production and his prose refused publication. He wrote The Master and Margarita between 1928 and 1940, revising it repeatedly, and died without seeing it published. His other works include the novel The White Guard, the play The Days of the Turbins, and a biographical novel about Molière. After his death his wife hid the manuscript, which finally appeared in a censored Soviet literary journal in 1966–67 and in full text abroad in 1967.
