The Work
The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita) was written by Mikhail Bulgakov between 1928 and 1940, revised repeatedly during his final years, and left unfinished at his death in 1940. The novel was first published - in a heavily censored version - in the Moscow literary journal Moskva in 1966-1967, twenty-six years after Bulgakov's death. The first uncensored Russian edition appeared in 1973 (published by YMCA-Press in Paris). The standard English translations are by Michael Glenny (1967), Mirra Ginsburg (1967), Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor (1995), and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1997). The Pevear-Volokhonsky translation is now the most widely read.
The novel is approximately 115,000 words, organized into two interleaved narratives across thirty-two chapters and an epilogue. It is widely regarded as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century and one of the masterpieces of world literature.
Biblical Engagement
The novel's engagement with the Bible operates through its 'novel within the novel' - the Master's retelling of the Passion, which occupies four chapters (2, 16, 25-26) interspersed throughout the main narrative. This retelling draws primarily on the Gospel of John (the most literary and philosophical of the Gospels) and on Matthew 27, but it radically reimagines the biblical account.
In Bulgakov's version, the character is called Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth in Aramaic/Hebrew), and he is presented not as the divine Son of God but as a wandering philosopher - gentle, somewhat naive, and profoundly human. The encounter between Yeshua and Pontius Pilate (John 18:28-19:16) is the theological center of the novel-within-the-novel. Pilate is depicted not as a weak bureaucrat (as in the Synoptic accounts) but as a complex, tormented figure who recognizes Yeshua's truth but lacks the courage to act on it.
John 19:12 ('If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend') is the decisive text: Pilate's cowardice is the novel's unforgivable sin, more damning than any act of violence. Pilate sentences Yeshua to death and is condemned to an eternity of restless insomnia - sitting on a moonlit stone terrace, tortured by the knowledge that he failed to speak the truth when it mattered. This punishment draws on the imagery of sleepless anguish in Psalm 77:4 ('Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so troubled that I cannot speak') and Daniel 6:18 (Darius's sleepless night after sending Daniel to the lions' den).
Job 1:6-12, where Satan appears before God as an accuser who tests the righteous, provides the theological framework for the Moscow narrative. The devil Woland (whose name derives from the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust, who at one point identifies himself as 'Voland') arrives in Moscow and tests its citizens, exposing their greed, cowardice, and mendacity. Like the Satan of Job, Woland operates with divine permission; like Goethe's Mephistopheles, he is 'part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'
The novel's epigraph, drawn from Goethe's Faust - 'Who are you, then? I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good' - invokes the Book of Job's Satan and frames the entire novel within the question of theodicy: if God permits evil, can evil itself serve God's purposes?
Matthew 26:14-16 and 27:3-5 (Judas's betrayal and suicide) inform the character of Judas in the Yershalaim chapters. Bulgakov reimagines Judas as a young man in love, lured into betrayal by the secret police of the high priest - a transparent parallel to the informers and secret police of Stalin's Soviet Union. The parallel between Judas's thirty pieces of silver and the rewards offered to Soviet citizens for informing on their neighbors is deliberate.
Author & Context
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891-1940) was born in Kyiv to a family of theologians. His father, Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, was a professor of Western theology at the Kyiv Theological Academy, and the young Bulgakov grew up immersed in the Bible, church history, and theological debate. He studied medicine at Kyiv University and served as a doctor during the Russian Civil War before turning to writing.
Bulgakov's literary career in Soviet Moscow was one of persistent persecution. His satirical works - particularly the play The Days of the Turbins (1926) and the novella Heart of a Dog (1925) - attracted the hostile attention of Soviet literary authorities. By 1929, all of his works had been banned from performance or publication. He wrote a desperate letter to Stalin in 1930 asking permission to emigrate; Stalin telephoned him personally and arranged a position at the Moscow Art Theatre, but Bulgakov remained under surveillance and suspicion for the rest of his life.
The Master and Margarita was written in these conditions - a novel about courage and cowardice, truth and censorship, composed by a writer who knew it could never be published in his lifetime. The novel's burning of the Master's manuscript echoes Bulgakov's own destruction of an early draft in 1930 (the famous line 'manuscripts don't burn' is both a defiant declaration and a theological statement about the indestructibility of truth).
Bulgakov's engagement with the Bible was shaped by his father's scholarship and by the Russian Orthodox theological tradition. The Passion narrative was central to his imagination - he wrote multiple treatments of it, including the play Pontius Pilate (unfinished). His Christology is heterodox: Yeshua Ha-Notsri is not the Christ of Nicene orthodoxy but a human figure of extraordinary moral courage and compassion. Whether Bulgakov's portrayal represents his own theological convictions or a literary strategy to evade censorship remains debated.
Plot Summary
The novel interweaves three plot lines. In contemporary Moscow, the devil Woland arrives with his retinue - the enormous cat Behemoth (whose name comes from Job 40:15), the fanged Azazello (from the fallen angel of Leviticus 16:8-10 and 1 Enoch), and the sardonic Koroviev - and proceeds to wreak havoc on the Soviet literary and cultural establishment. Woland exposes the hypocrisy, cowardice, and corruption of Moscow's citizens through a series of increasingly fantastic and satirical episodes: a variety show that strips the audience naked (literally and figuratively), a magic trick that rains money on the greedy, and the destruction of the headquarters of the writers' union.
In ancient Yershalaim (Jerusalem), Pontius Pilate interrogates Yeshua Ha-Notsri, recognizes his truth, and condemns him to death through cowardice. Pilate then arranges the murder of Judas and spends eternity tormented by his failure.
The third plot follows Margarita, who loves the Master - a writer whose novel about Pilate has been destroyed by Soviet critics. Margarita makes a deal with Woland (echoing the Faustian bargain), becomes a witch, presides over Satan's ball (a Walpurgis Night drawn from European folk tradition and Revelation 17's great harlot), and earns the Master's liberation. In the novel's conclusion, the Master and Margarita are granted 'peace' - not the 'light' of heaven, which they have not earned, but rest from suffering.
Key Passages
The opening encounter between Woland and Berlioz on Patriarch's Ponds is one of the most famous scenes in Russian literature. Woland asks Berlioz, the atheist literary editor, who governs human affairs if there is no God. Berlioz insists that 'man governs himself.' Woland replies with a question that echoes Matthew 6:34 ('Take therefore no thought for the morrow'): 'But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then who, one wonders, is directing human life and the whole order of things on earth?' Berlioz is decapitated by a streetcar within the hour.
The Pilate-Yeshua interrogation (Chapter 2) reimagines John 18:38 ('What is truth?'): Pilate, suffering from a migraine, finds Yeshua's presence physically healing. Yeshua tells Pilate, 'The truth is, first of all, that your head aches.' This radical domestication of the philosophical question - truth as immediate, embodied, relational - is Bulgakov's most original theological contribution.
'Manuscripts don't burn' - Woland's declaration when he produces the Master's destroyed novel - is the novel's most quoted line and functions as both a literary and theological statement: truth cannot be permanently suppressed, whether by Soviet censors or by Pilate's cowardice.
Critical Reception
The novel's publication in 1966-1967 caused a sensation in Russia and abroad. It was immediately recognized as a masterpiece - the culmination of the tradition of Russian satirical and philosophical fiction running from Gogol through Dostoevsky to Bulgakov. Samizdat (underground) copies of the uncensored text circulated throughout the Soviet Union.
Western critical reception was initially focused on the novel's political satire, but theological readings have become increasingly prominent. Laura Weeks, Edythe Haber, and Julie Curtis have produced major scholarly studies. The question of whether the novel is 'really' a Christian novel or an ironic secular retelling of the Passion remains debated. Andrew Barratt's Between Two Worlds: A Critical Introduction to The Master and Margarita (1987) argues for a deeply ambiguous religiosity; Lesley Milne's Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography (1990) emphasizes the biographical and political contexts.
Russian Orthodox responses have been mixed: some theologians embrace the novel's engagement with the Passion, while others object to the humanized, non-divine Yeshua and the sympathetic portrayal of the devil.
Theological Significance
The novel's most important theological contribution is its meditation on cowardice as the supreme sin. In the Master's novel-within-the-novel, Pilate is damned not for cruelty but for cowardice - for failing to speak the truth when it mattered. This is a directly political statement (in Soviet Russia, the failure to speak truth was the universal sin) and a theological one: moral cowardice, Bulgakov suggests, is worse than active malice because it betrays the truth one knows.
The novel also offers a distinctive theodicy. Woland's evil is permitted by a higher power and ultimately serves the good - the Jobian framework, filtered through Goethe. The final chapters, in which Yeshua (through his disciple Levi Matvei / Matthew) intercedes for the Master and Margarita, suggest a cosmos in which light and darkness are not equals but serve different functions within a providential order. Yet the Master receives 'peace, not light' - a distinction that echoes Dante's Limbo (the virtuous pagans who receive natural happiness but not the beatific vision) and leaves the novel's eschatology deliberately incomplete.
Legacy
The novel's influence on Russian and world literature is incalculable. It inspired a generation of Soviet-era writers, including the Strugatsky brothers and Viktor Pelevin. In the West, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) is explicitly indebted to Bulgakov's method of interweaving contemporary and religious-historical narratives. The novel has been adapted into multiple films, television series, operas, and a famous rock musical.
The Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil' (1968) was directly inspired by the novel. The phrase 'manuscripts don't burn' has become a rallying cry for writers and dissidents worldwide. The novel remains the most widely read work of Russian literature in the twenty-first century.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study John 18:28-19:22 (the trial before Pilate), Matthew 27:1-26 (Pilate washes his hands), Job 1:6-12 and 2:1-7 (Satan before God), Leviticus 16:8-10 (the scapegoat and Azazel), Revelation 17-18 (the great harlot and the fall of Babylon, which informs Satan's ball), and Matthew 26:14-16 with 27:3-10 (Judas's betrayal and death).
Further Reading
- J.A.E. Curtis, Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries (1991) - the standard literary biography, drawing on archival sources. - Andrew Barratt, Between Two Worlds: A Critical Introduction to The Master and Margarita (1987) - the best single-volume critical study. - Edythe C. Haber, Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years (1998) - essential for understanding the theological background of Bulgakov's family and education.