TRANSLATED AND WITH NOTES BY RICHARD PEVEAR
     AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
     WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD PEVEAR
     This translation published in PENGUIN BOOKS 1997
     OCR: Scout

Contents

     Introduction
     A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements

     BOOK ONE
     Never Talk with Strangers
     Pontius Pilate
     The Seventh Proof
     The Chase
     There were Doings at Griboedov's
     Schizophrenia, as was Said
     A Naughty Apartment
     The Combat between the Professor and the Poet
     Koroviev's Stunts
     News From Yalta
     Ivan Splits in Two
     Black Magic and Its Exposure
     The Hero Enters
     Glory to the Cock!
     Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream
     The Execution
     An Unquiet Day
     Hapless Visitors

     BOOK TWO
     Margarita
     Azazello's Cream
     Flight
     By Candlelight
     The Great Ball at Satan's
     The Extraction of the Master
     How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath
     The Burial
     The End of Apartment No.50
     The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth
     The Fate of the Master and Margarita is Decided
     It's Time! It's Time!
     On Sparrow Hills
     Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge
     Epilogue
     Notes

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  Moliere  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 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. That
certainly  accounts  for some of the amazement caused by its publication. It
was thought that virtually all of Bulgakov had found its way into print. And
here  was not some  minor literary remains but  a major novel, the  author's
crowning  work.  Then  there were the qualities of  the  novel itself--  its
formal originality,  its devastating  satire of  Soviet life, and  of Soviet
literary  life in particular, its 'theatrical' rendering of the Great Terror
of the thirties,  the audacity of its portrayal of Jesus  Christ and Pontius
Pilate,  not to mention Satan. But, above all, the  novel breathed an air of
freedom, artistic  and spiritual, which had  become rare indeed, not only in