The Master And Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov (Paperback, 2007)

Product Description

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita is a fiercely satirical fantasy that remained unpublished in its author's home country for over thirty years This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky the acclaimed translators of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina In Soviet Moscow God is dead but the devil
- to say nothing of his retinue of demons from a loudmouthed gun-toting tomcat to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev
- is very much alive As death & destruction spread through the city like wildfire condemning Moscow's cultural elite to prison cells & body bags only a madman the Master & Margarita his beautiful courageous lover can hope to end the chaos Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign & circulated in samizdat form for decades when The Master & the Margarita was finally published it became an overnight literary phenomenon signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere This luminous translation from the complete & unabridged Russian text is accompanied by an introduction by Richard Pevear exploring the extraordinary circumstances of the novel's composition & publication & how Bulgakov drew on carnivalesque folk traditions to create his ironic subversion of Soviet propaganda This edition also contains a list of further reading & a note on the text After finishing high school Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) entered the Medical School of Kiev University graduating in 1916 He wrote about his experiences as a doctor in his early works Notes of a Young Country Doctor His later works treated the subject of the artist & the tyrant under the guise of historical characters but The Master & Margarita is generally considered his masterpiece If you enjoyed The Master & Margarita you might like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels also available in Penguin Classics' One of the great novels of the 20th century a scary darkly comic allegory' Daily Telegraph