Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a fiercely satirical fantasy that remained unpublished in its author's home country for over thirty...

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a fiercely satirical fantasy that remained unpublished in its author's home country for over thirty years. This Penguin Classics edition is translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and includes an introduction by Richard Pevear.

In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil—and his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev—is very much alive. As death and destruction spread through the city like wildfire, condemning Moscow's cultural elite to prison cells and body bags, only a madman, the Master, and Margarita, his beautiful and courageous lover, can hope to end the chaos.

Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign and circulated in samizdat form for decades, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere.

This luminous translation, based on the complete and unabridged Russian text, is accompanied by an introduction exploring the extraordinary circumstances of the novel's composition and publication, as well as how Bulgakov drew on carnivalesque folk traditions to create an ironic subversion of Soviet propaganda. This edition also includes a list of further reading and a note on the text.

After finishing high school, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) entered the Medical School of Kiev University, graduating in 1916. He drew on his experiences as a doctor in his early work Notes of a Young Country Doctor. His later works explored the relationship between the artist and the tyrant through historical characters, but The Master and Margarita is generally considered his masterpiece.

If you enjoyed The Master and Margarita, you might also like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, also available in Penguin Classics.

'One of the great novels of the 20th century, a scary, darkly comic allegory' — Daily Telegraph