What is The Master and Margarita about?

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.

Bulgakov's prose is exuberant and shapeshifting — the comic sequences in Moscow are genuinely funny in a way that Soviet satirical fiction rarely is, and the transition from farce to genuine tragedy within a single chapter is handled with unusual deftness. The Jerusalem chapters are written in a different register entirely: spare, arid, and grave. The novel plays with multiple tones without losing coherence, which is part of what makes it feel like magic even in translation.

Readers who like their novels to add up cleanly — to have a single, extractable argument — will be frustrated by The Master and Margarita. It doesn't resolve into a thesis. It is strange in the way that only books written for no audience in particular tend to be strange: Bulgakov wrote it to survive, not to publish, and that freedom shows in every chapter.