The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is Great Thanks to Five People

 “‘And there’s no devil either?’ the sick man suddenly inquired merrily of Ivan Nikolaevich,

‘No devil…’

‘Well now that is positively interesting!’ the professor said, shaking with laughter. ‘What is it with you—no matter what one asks for, there isn’t any!” (41)

The Master and Margarita is a wonderful book, thanks to the efforts of five storytellers. Bulgakov is only the first.

He’s probably the most important, too. The 20th-century Russian author has a wicked talent for atmosphere; his 1937 novel transports the reader to a Moscow that almost existed. The tense, wild summers of the Stalin-era city propel the story like hot air filling up a balloon. From high up in its basket, the reader is free to behold a thousand tragedies, which, at such a distance, become comedies. Jerusalem appears on the horizon for a few moments, then a moonlit world beyond time and space. Naked witches glide past on brooms. Smoke fills the air. It is a fantastic voyage, but escaping the terror that grips the city below means taking a ride with the devil himself.

Satan, adorned in a checkered sport coat and trailed by a fiendish retinue, is the second entity that guides the story. He’s not strictly a hero or villain; as the magician Professor Woland, he captivates crowds, but as the latest in a long line of Russian trickster-protagonists he stupefies the bumbling artists and corrupt bureaucrats in the upper echelons of communist society. Most of the time, they deserve it. At Woland’s magic show, materialistic women fight one another to trade in their rags for conjured French fashions, only to emerge in their underwear. An unscrupulous landlord accepts a bribe that turns into illegal foreign currency. Other times, Satan’s victims are ordinary people thrust into the path of the scheming interpreter Koroviev or the gluttonous talking cat Behemoth.

Vignettes detailing his encounters, which make up the first half of the story, are initially disturbing but slowly morph into cathartic fun as Bulgakov sinks deeper into the climate of fear and suspicion which the ‘good’ characters—a relative term here applied to the Master, Margarita and the poet Ivan Homeless—endure daily. The only people to which Satan is resolutely loyal are Margarita, an unhappy housewife, and the Master, the disgraced author of a novel about Pontius Pilate.

The latter, who is also Margarita’s lover, is the third storyteller. The Master is not only an author-insert for Bulgakov himself, but a foil to Woland. This is most evident in their use of monogram: the magician distributes business cards marked with a W, while the Master demonstrates his profession by donning “a completely greasy black cap with the letter ‘M’ embroidered on it,” an inversion which (I think) also works in the original Cyrillic alphabet (135). He and Woland take turns telling the story, whose chapters, inserted sporadically into the longer narrative, create a commentary on the eternal use and abuse of power. Its depiction of the life and death of Jesus, here called Yeshua Ha-Nozri to distance the story from the biblical Greek, is not necessarily accurate but is an intriguing look at religious history in a country where most people, according to one literary critic, “long ago ceased believing in fairy tales about God” (8). Here, the biblical messiah becomes a ragged philosopher with a single wandering disciple, who is executed by Pilate out of cowardice and a sense of obligation. Their dialogues, as well as the descriptions of 1st-century Jerusalem, are some of the most beautiful in the whole book. But the credit for these passages must go to the fourth and fifth storytellers: the translators.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky did a great job translating The Master and Margarita from Russian to English for the Penguin Classics 50th anniversary Edition. Pevear and Volokhonksy’s prose is readable and image driven, and their cultural annotations help reveal the novel’s hidden depths. As far as I can tell, they represent the best of modern classic translation. They have translated at least 50 works of classic Russian literature together and won the PEN translation prize. While The Master and Margarita is the first book translated by them that I’ve read, my great-aunt claims that they produced “the only decent [English] copy” of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. They deserve at least as much real-world credit as Bulgakov for creating an enjoyable version of the story.

Because The Master and Margarita is such a good story, I find it much more difficult to share my opinion of it. Whenever I think about how much I love it, another amusing detail or message occurs to me. I want to reread it, to annotate it and discuss it with friends, to buy my own copy and treasure it. I’m really grateful that this book exists.

I just wish I knew who to thank.