The Master and Margarita: Introduction by Simon Franklin

The underground masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was written during Stalin’s regime and could not be published until many years after its author’s death.

When the devil arrives in 1930s Moscow, consorting with a retinue of odd associates—including a talking black cat, an assassin, and a beautiful naked witch—his antics wreak havoc among the literary elite of the world capital of atheism. Meanwhile, the Master, author of an unpublis...