The Master and Margarita (Penguin Classics)

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)