Master and Margarita Read Online
Master and Margarita
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 - Never Talk with Strangers
CHAPTER 5 - There were Doings at Griboedov’s
CHAPTER 6 - Schizophrenia, as was Said
CHAPTER 7 - A Naughty Apartment
CHAPTER 8 - The Combat between the Professor and the Poet
CHAPTER 11 - Ivan Splits in Two
CHAPTER 12 - Black Magic and Its Exposure
CHAPTER 14 - Glory to the Cock!
CHAPTER 15 - Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream
CHAPTER 23 - The Great Ball at Satan’s
CHAPTER 24 - The Extraction of the Master
CHAPTER 25 - How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath
CHAPTER 27 - The End of Apartment No. 50
CHAPTER 28 - The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth
CHAPTER 29 - The Fate of the Master and Margarita is Decided
CHAPTER 30 - It’s Time! It’s Time!
CHAPTER 32 - Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge
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.
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First published as Master i Margarita in serial form in Moskva, 1966-7
This translation published in Penguin Books 1997
Text copyright © Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966, 1967
Translation, Further Reading and Notes copyright © Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997
Introduction copyright © Richard Pevear, 1997
All rights reserved
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Introduction
Mikhail Bulgakov worked on this luminous book throughout one of the darkest decades of the century. His last revisions were dictated to his wife a few weeks before his death in 1940 at the age of forty-nine. For him, there was never any question of publishing the novel. The mere existence of the manuscript, had it come to the knowledge of Stalin’s police, would almost certainly have led to the permanent disappearance of its author. Yet the book was of great importance to him, and he clearly believed that a time would come when it could be published. Another twenty-six years had to pass before events bore out that belief and The Master and Margarita, by what seems a surprising oversight in Soviet literary politics, finally appeared in print. The effect was electrifying.
The monthly magazine Moskva, otherwise a rather cautious and quiet publication, carried the first part of The Master and Margarita in its November 1966 issue. The 150,000 copies sold out within hours. In the weeks that followed, group readings were held, people meeting each other would quote and compare favourite passages, there was talk of little else. Certain sentences from the novel immediately became proverbial. The very language of the novel was a contradiction of everything wooden, official, imposed. It was a joy to speak.
When the second part appeared in the January 1967 issue of Moskva, it was greeted with the same enthusiasm. Yet this was not the excitement caused by the emergence of a new writer, as when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the magazine Novy Mir in 1962. Bulgakov was neither unknown nor forgotten. His plays had begun to be revived in theatres during the late fifties and were published in 1962. His superb Life of Monsieur de Molière came out in that same year. His early stories were reprinted. Then, in 1965, came the Theatrical Novel, based on his years of experience with Stanislavsky’s renowned Moscow Art Theatre. And finally in 1966 a volume of Selected Prose was published, containing the complete text of Bulgakov’s first novel, The White Guard, written in the twenties and dealing with the nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of war in all of literature.
Bulgakov was known well enough, then. But, outside a very small group, the existence of The Master and Margarita was completely unsuspected.
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