num_pages: 412
description: One Spring afternoon the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow in Bulgakov's fantastical, funny and frightening satire of Soviet life. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from whitches poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will do anything to save the imprisoned writer she loves. Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reightn, when The Master and Margarita was finally published it became an overnight literary phenomenon, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere.This luminous translation from the complete and unabridged Russian text is accompanied by an introduction exploring the novel's extraordinary composition and publication, and how Bulgakov drew on carnivalesque folk traditions to create his ironic subersion of Soviet propaganda. This edition also contains further reading and a note on the text.(back cover)
language: English
title: The Master and Margarita
titlecomplete: The Master and Margarita
characters: Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, Stephan Bogdanovich Likhodeyev, Pontius Pilate, Behemot, Azazello, Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov, Margarita Nicolaevna, Lucifer, Yeshua Ha-Nozri, Hella (The Master and Margarita), Master, Natasha (The Master and Margarita), Korovyev
genres: Fiction, Magical Realism, Literature, Classics, Novels, Russian Literature, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Russia, 20th Century
ratings_count: 333774
places: Moscow, Russia, Jerusalem
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Premi Crítica Serra d'Or de Teatre i arts escèniques, awardedAt: 1388563200000
name: Read Russia Prize
category: 20th-Century Russian Literature for Alexander Nitzberg
publisher: Penguin Books