I recently had so much fun rereading this novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). The Master and Margarita was completed in 1937 but wasn’t published in any form until 1967. The full, unexpurgated version appeared in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protest and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the novel, the Devil and his retinue (including a black cat that walks on two legs) arrive in Moscow literally to decapitate the unbelieving head of a writer’s association and to wreak havoc on the literary elite. The so-called Master is the aspiring poet who starts out as a willing tool of the government-controlled literary organization but undergoes a transformation after being admitted to an insane asylum. The book is full of quasi-realistic caricatures of self-important bureaucrats and greedy opportunists. It is wickedly funny, replete with brilliant details, and totally uncategorizable. It can be read on so many levels: as Bildungsroman, as love story, as historical fiction, slapstick comedy, moral parable, social satire, a foray into Magic Realism, a philosophical allegory partially inspired by Gogol and Dostoevsky—you name it.
