The Master and Margarita

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Acknowledgements

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER 1 - Never Talk with Strangers

CHAPTER 2 - Pontius Pilate

CHAPTER 3 - The Seventh Proof

CHAPTER 4 - The Chase

CHAPTER 5 - There were Doings at Griboedov’s

CHAPTER 6 - Schizophrenia, as was Said

CHAPTER 7 - A Naughty Apartment

CHAPTER 8 - The Combat between the Professor and the Poet

CHAPTER 9 - Koroviev’s Stunts

CHAPTER 10 - News From Yalta

CHAPTER 11 - Ivan Splits in Two

CHAPTER 12 - Black Magic and Its Exposure

CHAPTER 13 - The Hero Enters

CHAPTER 14 - Glory to the Cock!

CHAPTER 15 - Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream

CHAPTER 16 - The Execution

CHAPTER 17 - An Unquiet Day

CHAPTER 18 - Hapless Visitors

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER 19 - Margarita

CHAPTER 20 - Azazello’s Cream

CHAPTER 21 - Flight

CHAPTER 22 - By Candlelight

CHAPTER 23 - The Great Ball at Satan’s

CHAPTER 24 - The Extraction of the Master

CHAPTER 25 - How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath

CHAPTER 26 - The Burial

CHAPTER 27 - The End of Apartment No. 50

CHAPTER 28 - The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth

CHAPTER 29 - The Fate of the Master and Margarita is Decided

CHAPTER 30 - It’s Time! It’s Time!

CHAPTER 31 - On Sparrow Hills

CHAPTER 32 - Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge

Epilogue

Notes

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV was born in Kiev in May 1891. He studied and briefly practised medicine and, after indigent wanderings through revolutionary Russia and the Caucasus, he settled in Moscow in 1921. His sympathetic portrayal of White characters in his stories, in the plays The Days of the Turbins (The White Guard), which enjoyed great success at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926, and Flight (1927), and his satirical treatment of the officials of the New Economic Plan, led to growing criticism, which became violent after the play The Purple Island. His later works treat the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical characters, with plays such as Molière, staged in 1936, Don Quixote, staged in 1940, and Pushkin, staged in 1943. He also wrote a brilliant biography, highly original in form, of his literary hero, Molière, but The Master and Margarita, a fantasy novel about the devil and his henchmen set in modern Moscow, is generally considered his masterpiece. Fame, at home and abroad, was not to come until a quarter of a century after his death at Moscow in 1940.

RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have produced acclaimed translations of works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. They have twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Their translations of Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and Anna Karenina are published in Penguin Classics. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, and married to each other and live in Paris.

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First published as Master i Margarita in serial form in Moskva, 1966-7

This translation published in Penguin Books 1997

Text copyright © Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966, 1967

Translation, Further Reading and Notes copyright © Richard Pevear and

Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997

Introduction copyright © Richard Pevear, 1997

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Introduction