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The Master and Margarita

(Penguin Classics)

By Mikhail Bulgakov, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

(119)

| Paperback | 9780140455465

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Book 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, fContinue

Critics

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

First published 26 years after his death in 1940, Bulgakov's extraordinary satire of life under the political, cultural, religious and bureaucratic strictures of Stalinist tyranny has been variously described as Solzhenitsyn crossed with Lewis Carrol ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

Sympathy for the Devil

In an early chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s funny and frightening novel, The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940 and now available in four different English translations, a character loses his head – literally. He slips on a Moscow stre ... (read full critics)

lrb published on Mon, 6 Sep 2010

11 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

I don't know how many times I read it, four times maybe... I'm sure that if I would start reading it again, I would enjoy it just like the first time. A masterpiece.

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TonySz said on Jun 20, 2011 | Add your feedback

The book worth reading in Russian like Crime and Punishment(Dostoevsky) or War and Piece (Tolstoy).

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Annet said on May 2, 2011 | Add your feedback

It shows the life at that time. All the failures of the post-revolutionary russia compaired to the ancient times are portrayed.
Witty, warm, touching, funny, sad, all at once.

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Middlemarch said on Sep 28, 2010 | Add your feedback

I think it takes more than one reading to understand it properly (and I haven't read it more than once), anyway it is brilliant!

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Chiaragattinoni said on Jun 12, 2010 | Add your feedback

I am situated squarely in the middle and will pick this book back up and finish it sometime this year. Although it is abandoned, I was enjoying it.

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Antonia said on Jan 2, 2009 | Add your feedback

Well. I didn't like it as much as I would have wanted but nevertheless enjoyed it. Conceptual literature isn't really my thing where you have to know what the book symbolizes or makes fun of etc and which doesn't have the faintest idea of an actual story. This one definitely belongs to that group ... (continue)

Well. I didn't like it as much as I would have wanted but nevertheless enjoyed it. Conceptual literature isn't really my thing where you have to know what the book symbolizes or makes fun of etc and which doesn't have the faintest idea of an actual story. This one definitely belongs to that group but luckily only half of it is only understandable to people who know more about Stalin's Moscow and therefore can actually enjoy the allegories. I laughed when I read (mostly because of the cat, he was such a hilarious character) and also the story was quite fascinating with Golgata and the Devil's ball.

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s u v i said on Aug 17, 2008 | Add your feedback