The Master and Margarita

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV was born in Kiev in May 1891. He studied and briefly practised medicine and, after indigent wanderings through revolutionary Russia and the Caucasus, he settled in Moscow in 1921. His sympathetic portrayal of White characters in his stories, in the plays The Days of the Turbins (The White Guard), which enjoyed great success at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926, and Flight (1927), and his satirical treatment of the officials of the New Economic Plan, led to growing criticism, which became violent after the play The Purple Island. His later works treat the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical characters, with plays such as Molière, staged in 1936, Don Quixote, staged in 1940, and Pushkin, staged in 1943. He also wrote a brilliant biography, highly original in form, of his literary hero, Molière, but The Master and Margarita, a fantasy novel about the devil and his henchmen set in modern Moscow, is generally considered his masterpiece. Fame, at home and abroad, was not to come until a quarter of a century after his death at Moscow in 1940.

RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have produced acclaimed translations of works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. They have twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Their translations of Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and Anna Karenina are published in Penguin Classics. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, and married to each other and live in Paris.

First published as Master i Margarita in serial form in Moskva, 1966-7

Text copyright © Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966, 1967

Translation copyright © Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997