A Reader’s Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

A Reader’s  
Companion to 
Mikhail Bulgakov’s  
The Master and 
Margarita

Companions to Russian Literature
Series Editor: Thomas Seifrid  
(University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

A Reader’s  
Companion to 
Mikhail Bulgakov’s  
The Master and 
Margarita
BOSTON
2020
J.A.E. CURTIS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Curtis, J. A. E. (Julie A. E.), author. 
Title: A reader’s companion to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The master and Margarita / 
J. A. E. Curtis. 
Other titles: Companions to Russian literature. 
Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019. | Series: Companions to 
Russian literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019026989 | ISBN 9781644691335 (hardcover) | ISBN 
9781644690789 (paperback) | ISBN 9781644690796 (adobe pdf) 
Subjects: LCSH: Bulgakov, Mikhail, 1891–1940. Master i Margarita.
Classification: LCC PG3476.B78 M33335 2019 | DDC 891.73/42--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026989
© 2019 Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-644691-33-5 (hardcover) 
ISBN 978-1-644690-78-9 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-644690-79-6 (electronic, pdf) 
Cover design by Ivan Grave. 
On the cover: 
‘Variety Theatre’, from a series of drawings and paintings on The Master and 
Margarita by the artist Laura Footes; image by kind permission of the artist and 
the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Book design by PHi Business Solutions. 
Published by Academic Studies Press in 2020
1577 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA 02446
press@academicstudiespress.com
www.academicstudiespress.com 

In loving memory of Adam Curtis 
(1950–2017)

Contents
Foreword
ix
  1.  Bulgakov’s Life: Formative Years and First  
Successes—1891–1928
1
  2.  Bulgakov’s Life: Battling the Censor, and Writing  
The Master and Margarita—1929–40
14
  3.  Drafts of The Master and Margarita
24
  4.  Publication History of The Master and Margarita in Russian
41
  5.  A Tale of Two Cities: The Structure of The Master  
and Margarita
49
  6.  Woland: Good and Evil in The Master and Margarita
61
  7.  Pilate and Ieshua: Biblical Themes in The Master  
and Margarita
72
  8.  Political Satire in The Master and Margarita
86
  9.  Literature and the Writer in The Master and Margarita
97
10.  “So who are you, then?” Narrative voices in The Master  
and Margarita, Followed by a Stylistic Analysis of Extracts  
from the Text
109
11.  English Translations of The Master and Margarita
132
Afterword—A Personal Reflection
143
Acknowledgements
149
Notes
151
Bibliography
167
Index
173

Foreword
I
t is over fifty years since Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita 
burst upon the literary scene in Soviet Russia and in the West in the late 1960s, 
its impact only heightened by the fact that its manuscript had been kept secret, 
carefully hidden out of sight from the Communist authorities, for over a quarter of a century since Bulgakov’s death in 1940. But the novel’s success was due 
not only to the sensational surprise of its rediscovery, so many decades after 
its author had hoped that it might reach its intended audience. The Master and 
Margarita’s unique blend of exuberant satirical humour, demonic pranks, and a 
poignant love story, together with a solemn investigation into the nature of good 
and evil through a revisiting of the encounter between Jesus Christ and Pontius 
Pilate, constituted a startlingly original contribution to the twentieth-century 
Russian literary canon. Since then, it has become a literary classic, and for many 
Russian readers a cult text. It has been translated from Russian into dozens of 
languages, and has generated an extraordinarily wide range of literary and cultural responses in Russia, and across the entire world.1
Occasionally a writer appears whose works, while being inevitably shaped 
by the cultural legacies of previous eras, are nevertheless characterized by a 
unique degree of inventiveness and bold imagination. Mikhail Bulgakov is 
one such writer, as was the nineteenth-century Russian writer whom he most 
admired, Nikolay Gogol′, of whom it is said that he succeeded in inaugurating 
European Modernism several decades before its time. To take just the example of Gogol′s most famous short story The Nose (1836): its author contrives 
a bizarre plot out of a fractured, almost absurd narrative structure, launches 
the theme of the “unreal city” with his surreal depiction of St. Petersburg, and 
offers the reader a tale which lends itself most fruitfully to a Freudian reading. 
All these things would become key features of literature of the Modernist era. 
Nothing in the books that Gogol′ had read, nor in his literary environment, 
could have prepared contemporary readers for the shock that The Nose offered 
them. Bulgakov described Gogol′ as his favorite writer and his teacher, and 
observed that “no one can compare with him.”2 And just like Gogol′, Bulgakov 

Companion to The Master and Margarita
x
created in The Master and Margarita a novel quite unlike anything that had 
come before it in the Russian tradition or any other tradition, a text all the more 
startling for its utter indifference to the prevailing discourse of its time of writing in Soviet Russia, the discourse of Socialist Realism.
Bulgakov’s greatest novel has reverberated in literary culture not just since 
its belated publication, but maybe even before that moment finally arrived in 
the 1960s. A text that has not yet been published might be considered incapable of inspiring other works; but as fuller archival documentation has begun 
to emerge it has become increasingly apparent, for example, that the poet and 
novelist Boris Pasternak, who admired Bulgakov and got to know him well in 
the final months of his life, would have discussed The Master and Margarita with 
his dying friend, and probably read the entire text in 1939 or 1940. We can 
therefore start to look at his own Dr Zhivago (completed in 1956) with different 
eyes. Both novels have as a central protagonist a writer living in the Soviet era 
whose creative gifts insulate him in some respects from the turmoil around him, 
but who as an individual is flawed and weak. Pasternak’s device of attaching to 
his own novel a complete cycle of poems written by Yury Zhivago, and reflecting on the yearly unfolding of Christian celebrations, is a structural innovation 
comparable in its originality—but also in its central preoccupations—to Bulgakov’s “novel within a novel” in The Master and Margarita. Lesley Milne quotes 
a passage from Dr Zhivago which reveals just how much the two authors’ views 
on the role of religion in the modern world overlapped: “One can be an atheist, 
can doubt the existence and purpose of God, and yet know at the same time 
that man lives not in nature but in history, and that history as we understand it 
today is founded by Christ, that the Gospel is its foundation.” She rightly concludes that: “In their novels the two writers stand firmly together, expressing 
shared cultural assumptions: the significance in European art and literature of 
the Christian idea and the validity of the ethical paradigm therein enshrined, 
in the face of an epoch which systematically negated these paradigms in word 
and in deed.”3 Pasternak died twenty years after Bulgakov, in 1960, and his great 
novel similarly had to wait another quarter of a century before first being published in the Soviet Union in 1988.
Once The Master and Margarita had appeared in print in the late 1960s, it 
began to play a quite different role in sparking innovative creativity. Since then, 
the range of its impacts within Russia has been immense, whether in inspiring 
the novelist Chingiz Aitmatov to interpolate a vision of the encounter between 
Christ and Pilate in his ground-breaking glasnost′ novel The Executioner’s Block 
(1987), or in prompting the opening lines of the first volume in Boris Akunin’s