The MASTER and MARGARITA [the novel]

About Me

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.

THIS SPACE IS MADE BY ANAIS

My Interests

I'd like to meet:

Â« And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone's bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you're afraid, afraid . . . Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!
-------------
Â« Early in the morning on the fourteenth of the spring month of Nisan the
Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, in a white cloak lined with blood-red,
emerged with his shuffling cavalryman's walk into the arcade connecting the
two wings of the palace of Herod the Great.
-------------

Â« Follow me, reader!
Who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love?
Cut out his lying tongue!
Follow me, reader, and only me and I will show you that love!
-------------
Â« Gods, my gods! What, then, did this woman need?!
What did this woman need, in whose eyes there always burned some enigmatic little fire?
What did she need, this witch with a slight cast in one eye, who had adorned herself with mimosa that time in the spring?
I do not know. I have no idea.
Obviously she was telling the truth, she needed him, the master, and not at all some Gothic mansion, not a private garden, not money.
She loved him, she was telling the truth.
-------------
Â« 'But this is the question that disturbs me - if there is no God, then who, one wonders, rules the life of man and keeps the world in order?'
'Man rules himself'.
'But to rule one must have a precise plan worked out for some reasonable period ahead. Allow me to enquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term, such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow?
-------------
Â« Love leaped out at us like a murderer jumping out of a dark alley.
It shocked us both â€” the shock of a stroke of lightning, the shock of a flick-knife.
-------------
Â« The third member of the company was a cat the size of a pig, black as soot and with luxuriant cavalry officer's whiskers.

Books:

Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (May 15, 1891 - March 10, 1940) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, the oldest son of a professor at a theological seminary. The Bulgakov sons enlisted in the White Army, and in post-Civil War Russia, ended up in Paris, save for Mikhail. Mikhail Bulgakov, who enlisted as a field doctor, ended up in the Caucasus, where he eventually began working as a journalist. Despite his relatively favored status under the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin, Bulgakov was prevented from either emigrating or visiting his brothers in the West.
In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatyana Lappa. In 1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University. In 1921, he moved with Tatyana to Moscow. Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Liubov' Belozerskaia. In 1932, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Elena Shilovskaia. During the last decade of his life, Bulgakov continued to work on The Master and Margarita, wrote plays, critical works, stories, and made several translations and dramatisations of novels. However, most of his works were consigned to his desk drawer for several decades. In 1938 he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate, but he never received a reply.
Bulgakov died from an inherited kidney disorder in 1940 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
manuscripts don't burn. and if there are no documents, there is no such person.
[ M. Bulgakov ]
The stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?
[ M. Bulgakov, The White Guard, 1925 ]