About this item
Highlights
- This edition (Classic Wisdom Reprint) is non-censored, based on a samizdat version and translated in Russia by an unknown translator.
- Author(s): Mikhail Bulgakov
- 444 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Magical Realism
Description
About the Book
Published only after the death of Bulgakov in 1966 with the notes he left to his wife, Master and Margarita was heavily edited and censored in the Soviet Union, and even some contemporary US editions are based on this version.Book Synopsis
This edition (Classic Wisdom Reprint) is non-censored, based on a samizdat version and translated in Russia by an unknown translator.
Widely held as one of the best novels of the 20th century the book depicts a story in a story, a manuscript of a Biblical story that the Master cannot publish and locked up in the asylum for.
The story concerns a visit by the devil to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. The Master and Margarita combine supernatural elements with satirical dark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying a singular genre.
Literary critic, assistant professor at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Nadezhda Dozhdikova notes that the image of Jesus as a harmless madman presented in ″Master and Margarita″ has its source in the literature of the USSR of the 1920s, which, following the tradition of the demythologization of Jesus in the works Strauss, Renan, Nietzsche, and Binet-Sanglé, put forward two main themes - mental illness and deception. The mythological option, namely the denial of the existence of Jesus, only prevailed in the Soviet propaganda at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.
Review Quotes
"By turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative, and poignant . . . A great work." --Chicago Tribune
"Nude vampires, gun-toting talking black cat, and the devil as ultimate party starter aside, the miracle of this novel is that every time you read it, it's a different book." --Marlon James, "My 10 Favorite Books," in T: The New York Times Style Magazine
"One of the truly great Russian novels of [the twentieth] century." --The New York Times Book Review
"A soaring, dazzling novel; an extraordinary fusion of wildly disparate elements. It is a concerto played simultaneously on the organ, the bagpipes, and a pennywhistle, while someone sets off fireworks between the players' feet." --The New York Times
"Fine, funny, imaginative . . . The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative." --Newsweek