Though the text never openly acknowledges that it’s set in Stalinist Russia, the clues are certainly there. The novel is consistently-and comically-critical of authorities and shows up the follies of a state exerting too much of an interfering influence on its people. The Master and Margarita was a risky book for Bulgakov to write, which ultimately explains why it wasn’t published during his lifetime. He died in the Spring of 1940 from kidney problems, almost thirty years before this novel would first be published (thanks to the efforts of Yelena). During these years he worked away on his “sunset” novel, The Master and Margarita, veering between confidence in its worth and hopelessness. In the late 1930s, Bulgakov worked as a librettist and consultant at the Bolshoi Theater, but faced the same frustrations that had plagued him before. He married his third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, in 1932 she was the inspiration for much of the “Margarita” character in The Master and Margarita. Around 1924, Bulgakov married again by the end of the decade he almost left Russia, depressed by the poor critical reception of his work and ongoing battles with Soviet censorship. Stalin did, however, procure Bulgakov work at a small Moscow theater and even personally enjoyed Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Most of his plays in the 1920s were banned from production, considered too controversial and provocative by Stalin’s censors.
In 1919, Bulgakov began writing for theater and also honed his skills by writing “feuilletons”-short and witty satirical pieces-for newspapers. He then served in the Russian Civil War, during which he contracted typhus the disease nearly killed him and made him decide to abandon his career as a doctor. Bulgakov also trained as a medical physician at Kiev University and, shortly after marrying his first wife, Tatiana Lappa, served with the Red Cross in World War One. Looking beyond the religious environment in which he grew up, Bulgakov developed an early interest in theater and did well in his education, especially drawn to literature by writers such as Gogol, Pushkin, and Dostoyevsky. Poland (1987): No account/allegory of the time of Stalin’s purges and its attendant performative atheism is complete without a lot of serious blue eyeshadow.Mikhail Bulgakov was one of seven children born to Afanasiy Ivanovich Bulgakov, a prominent Orthodox theologian, and Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakov, a teacher. So this cover was just an ugly product of its time.
#The master and margarita full
Russia (2000): Russia at the turn of the millennium was full of neo-liberal promise, new money and lots and lots of disembodied hands in white gloves. On an entirely less serious note, here then-on the 77th anniversary of the author’s death-are 75 of the book’s covers, from around the world, ranked (with comment). Wth recent news of its impending adaptation to the screen, The Master and Margarita is one such lesson that seems as relevant as it ever has.
As shadows lengthen now in the corridors of American power, many are looking to the past, to the hard lessons of 20th-century totalitarianism, to better understand this dire present. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov’s dark and beloved satire of Stalinist Moscow, The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil comes to town accompanied by a big, black talking cat (among others).
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