The Bulgakov fantasy is less striking here, but less strident, too. His (Harper & Row) version is simpler, softer, and more humane. Translator Michael Glenny, on the other hand, almost suggests Tolstoy. Her Bulgakov reminds one of the virtuoso effects encountered in Zamyatin and Babel, as yell as the early Pasternak's bizarre tale of Heine in Italy. Mirra Ginsburg's (Grove Press) version is pointedly grotesque: she delights in the sharp, spinning, impressionistic phrase. The battle of competing translations, a new publishing phenomenon which began with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, now offers two rival American editions of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

What ensues is a novel of in exhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s.

The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.ДЄn audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature.

The master and margarita epub burgin