The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov TRANSLATED AND WITH NOTES BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY, PENGUIN BOOKS 1997 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD PEVEAR Contents Introduction A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements BOOK ONE Never Talk with Strangers Pontius Pilate The Seventh Proof The Chase There were Doings at Griboedov's Schizophrenia, as was Said A Naughty Apartment The Combat between the Professor and the Poet Koroviev's Stunts News From Yalta Ivan Splits in Two Black Magic and Its Exposure The Hero Enters Glory to the Cock! Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream The Execution An Unquiet Day Hapless Visitors BOOK TWO Margarita Azazello's Cream Flight By Candlelight The Great Ball at Satan's The Extraction of the Master How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath The Burial The End of Apartment No.50 The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth The Fate of the Master and Margarita is Decided It's Time! It's Time! On Sparrow Hills Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge Epilogue Notes Introduction Mikhail Bulgakov worked on this luminous book throughout one of thedarkest decades of the century. His last revisions were dictated to his wifea few weeks before his death in 1940 at the age of forty-nine. For him,there was never any question of publishing the novel. The mere existence ofthe manuscript, had it come to the knowledge of Stalin's police, wouldalmost certainly have led to the permanent disappearance of its author. Yetthe book was of great importance to him, and he clearly believed that a timewould come when it could be published. Another twenty-six years had to passbefore events bore out that belief and The Master and Margarita, by whatseems a surprising oversight in Soviet literary politics, finally appearedin print. The effect was electrifying. The monthly magazine Moskva, otherwise a rather cautious and quietpublication, carried the first part of The Master and Margarita in itsNovember 1966 issue. The 150,000 copies sold out within hours.
In the weeksthat followed, group readings were held, people meeting each other wouldquote and compare favourite passages, there was talk of little else. Certainsentences from the novel immediately became proverbial. The very language ofthe novel was a contradiction of everything wooden, official, imposed. Itwas a joy to speak. When the second part appeared in the January 1967 issue of Moskva, itwas greeted with the same enthusiasm. Yet this was not the excitement causedby the emergence of a new writer, as when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Dayin the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the magazine Novy Mir in 1962.Bulgakov was neither unknown nor forgotten. His plays had begun to berevived in theatres during the late fifties and were published in 1962. Hissuperb Life of Monsieur de Moliere came out in that same year. His earlystories were reprinted. Then, in 1965, came the Theatrical Novel, based onhis years of experience with Stanislavsky's renowned Moscow Art Theatre. Andfinally
in 1966 a volume of Selected Prose was published, containing thecomplete text of Bulgakov's first novel. The White Guard, written in thetwenties and dealing with nearly contemporary events of the Russian civilwar in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sightedportrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions ofwar in all of literature. Bulgakov was known well enough, then. But, outside a very small group,the existence of The Master and Margarita was completely unsuspected. Thatcertainly accounts for some of the amazement caused by its publication. Itwas thought that virtually all of Bulgakov had found its way into print. Andhere was not some minor literary remains but a major novel, the author'scrowning work. Then there were the qualities of the novel itself-- itsformal originality, its devastating satire of Soviet life, and of Sovietliterary life in particular, its 'theatrical' rendering of the Great Terrorof the thirties, the
audacity of its portrayal of Jesus Christ and PontiusPilate, not to mention Satan. But, above all, the novel breathed an air offreedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only inSoviet Russia. We sense it in the special tone of Bulgakov's writing, acombination of laughter (satire, caricature, buffoonery) and the mostunguarded vulnerability. Two aphorisms detachable from the novel may suggestsomething of the complex nature of this freedom and how it may have struckthe novel's first readers. One is the much-quoted 'Manuscripts don't burn',which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry,imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thusbecome a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master andMargarita was taken as a proof of the assertion. In fact, during a moment offear early in his work on the novel, Bulgakov did burn what he had written.And yet, as we see, it refused to stay burned. This moment of
fear, however,brings me to the second aphorism - 'Cowardice is the most terrible of vices'- which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel. Morepenetrating than the defiant 'Manuscripts don't burn', this word touched theinner experience of generations of Russians. To portray that experience withsuch candour required another sort of freedom and a love for something morethan 'culture'. Gratitude for such perfect expression of this other, deeperfreedom must surely have been part of the enthusiastic response of readersto the novel's first appearance. And then there was the sheer unlikeliness of its publication. By 1966the 'thaw' that had followed Stalin's death was over and a new freeze wascoming. The hopes awakened by the publication of One Day in the Life of IvanDenisovich, the first public acknowledgement of the existence of the Gulag,had been disappointed. In 1964 came the notorious trial of the poet JosephBrodsky, and a year later the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky
and YuliDaniel, both sentenced to terms in that same Gulag. Solzhenitsyn saw a newStalinization approaching, made worse by the terrible sense of repetition,stagnation and helplessness. Such was the monotonously grim atmosphere ofthe Brezhnev era. And in the midst of it there suddenly burst The Master andMargarita, not only an anomaly but an impossibility, a sort of cosmic error,evidence of some hidden but fatal crack in the system of Soviet power.People kept asking, how could they have let it happen? Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, orpossibly at the end of 1928. It was abandoned, taken up again, burned,resurrected, recast and revised many times. It accompanied Bulgakov throughthe period of greatest suffering for his people -- the period of forcedcollectivization and the first five-year plan, which decimated Russia'speasantry and destroyed her agriculture, the period of expansion of thesystem of 'corrective labour camps', of the penetration
of the secret policeinto all areas of life, of the liquidation of the intelligentsia, of vastparty purges and the Moscow 'show trials'. In literature the same strugglewent on in miniature, and with the same results. Bulgakov was not arrested,but by 1930 he found himself so far excluded that he could no longer publishor produce his work. In an extraordinarily forthright letter to the centralgovernment, he asked for permission to emigrate, since the hostility of theliterary powers made it impossible for him to live. If emigration was notpermitted, 'and if I am condemned to keep silent in the Soviet Union for therest of my days, then I ask the Soviet government to give me a job in myspeciality and assign me to a theatre as a titular director.' Stalin himselfanswered this letter by telephone on 17 April, and shortly afterwards theMoscow Art Theatre hired Bulgakov as an assistant director and literaryconsultant. However, during the thirties only his stage adaptations ofGogol's Dead Souls
and Cervantes' Don Quixote were granted a normal run. Hisown plays either were not staged at all or were quickly withdrawn, and hisLife of Monsieur de Moliere, written in 1932--5 for the collection Lives ofIllustrious Men, was rejected by the publisher. These circumstances areeverywhere present in The Master and Margarita, which was in part Bulgakov'schallenge to the rule of terror in literature. The successive stages of hiswork on the novel, his changing evaluations of the nature of the book andits characters, reflect events in his life and his deepening grasp of whatwas at stake in the struggle. I will briefly sketch what the study of hisarchives has made known of this process. The novel in its definitive version is composed of two distinct butinterwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancientJerusalem (called Yershalaim). Its central characters are Woland (Satan) andhis retinue, the poet Ivan Homeless, Pontius Pilate, an unnamed writer knownas 'the master',
and Margarita. The Pilate story is condensed into fourchapters and focused on four or five large-scale figures. The Moscow storyincludes a whole array of minor characters. The Pilate story, which passesthrough a succession of narrators, finally joins the Moscow story at theend, when the fates of Pilate and the master are simultaneously decided. Theearliest version, narrated by a first-person 'chronicler' and entitled TheEngineer's Hoof, was written in the first few months of 1929. It containedno trace of Margarita and only a faint hint of the master in a minorcharacter representing the old intelligentsia. The Pilate story was confinedto a single chapter. This version included the essentials of the Moscowsatire, which afterwards underwent only minor revisions and rearrangements.It began in much the same way as the definitive version, with a dialoguebetween a people's poet and an editor (here of an anti-religious magazine.The Godless) on the correct portrayal of Christ as
an exploiter of theproletariat. A stranger (Woland) appears and, surprised at their unbelief,astounds them with an eyewitness account of Christ's crucifixion. Thisaccount forms the second chapter, entitled 'The Gospel of Woland'. Clearly, what first spurred Bulgakov to write the novel was his outrageat the portrayals of Christ in Soviet anti-religious propaganda (The Godlesswas an actual monthly magazine of atheism, published from 1922 to 1940). Hisresponse was based on a simple reversal -- a vivid circumstantial narrativeof what was thought to be a 'myth' invented by the ruling class, and abreaking down of the self-evident reality of Moscow life by the intrusion ofthe 'stranger'. This device, fundamental to the novel, would be more fullyelaborated in its final form. Literary satire was also present from thestart. The fifth chapter of the definitive version, entitled There wereDoings at Griboedov's', already appeared intact in this earliest draft,where it was entitled 'Mania
Furibunda'. In May of 1929, Bulgakov sent thischapter to a publisher, who rejected it. This was his only attempt topublish anything from the novel. The second version, from later in the same year, was a reworking of thefirst four chapters, filling out certain episodes and adding the death ofJudas to the second chapter, which also began to detach itself from Wolandand become a more autonomous narrative. According to the author's wife,Elena Sergeevna, Bulgakov partially destroyed these two versions in thespring of 1930 -- 'threw them in the fire', in the writer's own words. Whatsurvived were two large notebooks with many pages torn out. This was at theheight of the attacks on Bulgakov . in the press, the moment of his letterto the government. After that came some scattered notes in two notebooks, keptintermittently over the next two years, which was a very difficult time forBulgakov. In the upper-right-hand corner of the second, he wrote: 'Lord, help me to finish
my novel, 1931.' In a fragment of a laterchapter, entitled 'Woland's Flight', there is a reference to someoneaddressed familiarly as ty, who is told that he 'will meet with Schubert andclear mornings'. This is obviously the master, though he is not called so.There is also the first mention of the name of Margarita. In Bulgakov'smind, the main outlines of a new conception of the novel were evidentlyalready clear. This new version he began to write in earnest in October of 1932,during a visit to Leningrad with Elena Sergeevna, whom he had just married.(The 'model' for Margarita, who had now entered the composition, she waspreviously married to a high-ranking military official, who for some timeopposed her wish to leave him for the writer, leading Bulgakov to think hewould never see her again.) His wife was surprised that he could set to workwithout having any notes or earlier drafts with him, but Bulgakov explained,'I know it by heart.' He continued working, not without
long interruptions,until 1936. Various new tides occurred to him, all still referring to Satanas the central figure -- The Great Chancellor, Satan, Here I Am, The BlackTheologian, He Has Come, The Hoofed Consultant. As in the earliest version,the time of the action is 24-- 5 June, the feast of St John, traditionally atime of magic enchantments (later it was moved to the time of the springfull moon). The nameless friend of Margarita is called 'Faust' in somenotes, though not in the text itself. He is also called 'the poet', and ismade the author of a novel which corresponds to the 'Gospel of Woland' fromthe first drafts. This historical section is now broken up and moved to alater place in the novel, coming closer to what would be the arrangement inthe final version. Bulgakov laboured especially over the conclusion of the novel and whatreward to give the master. The ending appears for the first time in achapter entitled 'Last Flight', dating from July 1956. It differs littlefrom
the final version. In it, however, the master is told explicitly anddirectly: The house on Sadovaya and the horrible Bosoy will vanish from yourmemory, but with them will go Ha-Nozri and the forgiven hegemon. Thesethings are not for your spirit. You will never raise yourself higher, youwill not see Yeshua, you will never leave your refuge. In an earlier note, Bulgakov had written even more tellingly: 'You willnot hear the liturgy. But you will listen to the romantics . . .' Thesewords, which do not appear in the definitive text, tell us how painfullyBulgakov weighed the question of cowardice and guilt in considering the fateof his hero, and how we should understand the ending of the final version.They also indicate a thematic link between Pilate, the master, and theauthor himself, connecting the historical and contemporary parts of thenovel. In a brief reworking from 1936--7, Bulgakov brought the beginning ofthe Pilate story back to the second chapter, where
it would remain, and inanother reworking from 1937-8 he finally found the definitive tide for thenovel. In this version, the original narrator, a characterized 'chronicler',is removed. The new narrator is that fluid voice -- moving freely fromdetached observation to ironic double voicing, to the most personalinterjection - which is perhaps the finest achievement of Bulgakov's art. The first typescript of The Master and Margarita, dating to 1958, wasdictated to the typist by Bulgakov from this last revision, with manychanges along the way. In 1939 he made further alterations in thetypescript, the most important of which concerns the fate of the hero andheroine. In the last manuscript version, the fate of the master andMargarita, announced to them by Woland, is to follow Pilate up the path ofmoonlight to find Yeshua and peace. In the typescript, the fate of themaster, announced to Woland by Matthew Levi, speaking for Yeshua, is not tofollow Pilate but
to go to his 'eternal refuge' with Margarita, in a ratherGerman-Romantic setting, with Schubert's music and blossoming cherry trees.Asked by Woland, 'But why don't you take him with you into the light?' Levireplies in a sorrowful voice, 'He does not deserve the light, he deservespeace.' Bulgakov, still pondering the problem of the master's guilt (and hisown, for what he considered various compromises, including his work on aplay about Stalin's youth), went back to his notes and revisions from 1936,but lightened their severity with an enigmatic irony. This was to be thedefinitive resolution. Clearly, the master is not to be seen as a heroicmartyr for art or a 'Christ-figure'. Bulgakov's gentle irony is a warningagainst the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, ofequating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard'sterms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical. In the evolution of The Master and Margarita, the Moscow satire ofWoland
and his retinue versus the literary powers and the imposed normalityof Soviet life in general is there from the first, and comes to involve themaster when he appears, acquiring details from the writer's own life andwith them a more personal tone alongside the bantering irreverence of thedemonic retinue. The Pilate story, on the other hand, the story of an act ofcowardice and an interrupted dialogue, gains in weight and independence asBulgakov's work progresses. From a single inset episode, it becomes thecentrepiece of the novel, setting off the contemporary events and serving astheir measure. In style and form it is a counterpoint to the rest of thebook. Finally, rather late in the process, the master and Margarita appear,with Margarita coming to dominate the second part of the novel. Her story isa romance in the old sense - the celebration of a beautiful woman, of a truelove, and of personal courage. These three stories, in form as well as content, embrace virtually allthat was excluded
from official Soviet ideology and its literature. But ifthe confines of 'socialist realism' are utterly exploded, so are theconfines of more traditional novelistic realism. The Master and Margarita asa whole is a consistently free verbal construction which, true to its ownpremises, can re-create ancient Jerusalem in the smallest physical detail,but can also alter the specifics of the New Testament and play variations onits principal figures, can combine the realities of Moscow life withwitchcraft, vampirism, the tearing off and replacing of heads, can describefor several pages the sensation of flight on a broomstick or the gatheringof the infamous dead at Satan's annual spring ball, can combine the mostacute sense of the fragility of human life with confidence in itsindestructibility. Bulgakov underscores the continuity of this verbal worldby having certain phrases -- 'Oh, gods, my gods', 'Bring me poison', 'Evenby moonlight I have no peace' -- migrate from one character
to another, orto the narrator. A more conspicuous case is the Pilate story itself,successive parts of which are told by Woland, dreamed by the poet Homeless,written by the master, and read by Margarita, while the whole preserves itsstylistic unity. Narrow notions of the 'imitation of reality' break downhere. But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novelas a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol,of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius. The mobile butpersonal narrative voice of the novel, the closest model for which Bulgakovmay have found in Gogol's Dead Souls, is the perfect medium for thiscontinuous verbal construction. There is no multiplicity of narrators in thenovel. The voice is always the same. But it has unusual range, picking up,parodying, or ironically undercutting the tones of the novel's manycharacters, with undertones of lyric and epic poetry and old popular tales. Bulgakov always loved
clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann thatirony and buffoonery are expressions of 'the deepest contemplation of lifein all its conditionality'. It is not by chance that his stage adaptationsof the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writingof The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific 'influences' stands theage-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, itsreversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes -- atradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov'scountryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's Rabelais and HisWorld, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality asBulgakov's novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita.The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it,Bulgakov's wife noted that, while there had never been any direct linkbetween the two men, they were both responding to the same historicalsituation
from the same cultural basis. Many observations from Bakhtin's study seem to be aimed directly atBulgakov's intentions, none more so than his comment on Rabelais's travestyof the 'hidden meaning', the 'secret', the 'terrifying mysteries' ofreligion, politics and economics: 'Laughter must liberate the gay truth ofthe world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear,suffering, and violence.' The settling of scores is also part of thetradition of carnival laughter. Perhaps the most pure example is theTestament of the poet Francois Villon, who in the liveliest verse handed outappropriate 'legacies' to all his enemies, thus entering into tradition andeven earning himself a place in the fourth book of Rabelais's Gargantua andPantagruel. So, too, Bakhtin says of Rabelais: In his novel ... he uses the popular-festive system of images with itscharter of freedoms consecrated by many centuries; and he uses it to inflicta severe punishment upon his foe, the
Gothic age ... In this setting ofconsecrated rights Rabelais attacks the fundamental dogmas and sacraments,the holy of holies of medieval ideology. And he comments further on the broad nature of this tradition: For thousands of years the people have used these festive comic imagesto express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth, and theirhighest hopes and aspirations. Freedom was not so much an exterior right asit was the inner content of these images. It was the thousand-year-oldlanguage of feariessness, a language with no reservations and omissions,about the world and about power. Bulgakov drew on this same source in settling his scores with thecustodians of official literature and official reality. The novel's form excludes psychological analysis and historicalcommentary. Hence the quickness and pungency of Bulgakov's writing. At thesame time, it allows Bulgakov to exploit all the theatricality of its greatscenes -- storms, flight, the attack
of vampires, all the antics of thedemons Koroviev and Behemoth, the seance in the Variety theatre, the ball atSatan's, but also the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, the crucifixion aswitnessed by Matthew Levi, the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden ofGethsemane. Bulgakov's treatment of Gospel figures is the most controversial aspectof The Master and Margarita and has met with the greatest incomprehension.Yet his premises are made clear in the very first pages of the novel, in thedialogue between Woland and the atheist Berlioz. By the deepest irony ofall, the 'prince of this world' stands as guarantor of the 'other' world. Itexists, since he exists. But he says nothing directly about it. Apart fromdivine revelation, the only language able to speak of the 'other' world isthe language of parable. Of this language Kafka wrote, in his parable 'OnParables': Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables andof no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.
When the sage says:'Go over,' he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, whichwe could do anyhow if it was worth the trouble; he means some fabulousyonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designatemore precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least. All theseparables really set out to say simply that the incomprehensible isincomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have tostruggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you onlyfollowed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that ndof all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You win. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality. In parable you lose. A similar dialogue lies at the heart of Bulgakov's novel. In it thereare those who belong to parable and those who belong to
reality. There arethose who go over and those who do not. There are those who win in parableand become parables themselves, and there are those who win in reality. Butthis reality belongs to Woland. Its nature is made chillingly clear in thebrief scene when he and Margarita contemplate his special globe. Wolandsays: 'For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by theocean? Look, it's filling with fire. A war has started there. If you lookcloser, you'll see the details.' Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of landspread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a reliefmap. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village nearit. A little house the size of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox.Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house flew up along with a cloudof black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of thelittle two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke
pouring from it.Bringing her eye stffl closer, Margarita made out a small female figurelying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little childwith outstretched arms. That's it,' Woland said, smiling, 'he had no time to sin. Abaddon'swork is impeccable.' When Margarita asks which side this Abaddon is on, Woland replies: 'He is of a rare impartiality and sympathizes equally with both sidesof the fight. Owing to that, the results are always the same for bothsides.' There are others who dispute Woland's claim to the power of this world.They are absent or all but absent from The Master and Margarita. But thereality of the world seems to be at their disposal, to be shaped by them andto bear their imprint. Their names are Caesar and Stalin. Though absent inperson, they are omnipresent. Their imposed will has become the measure ofnormality and self-evidence. In other words, the normality of this world isimposed terror. And, as the story of Pilate shows,
this is by no means atwentieth-century phenomenon. Once terror is identified with the world, itbecomes invisible. Bulgakov's portrayal of Moscow under Stalin's terror isremarkable precisely for its weightless, circus-like theatricality and lackof pathos. It is a sub-stanceless reality, an empty suit writing at a desk.The citizens have adjusted to it and learned to play along as they alwaysdo. The mechanism of this forced adjustment is revealed in the chapterrecounting 'Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream', in which prison, denunciation andbetrayal become yet another theatre with a kindly and helpful master ofceremonies. Berlioz, the comparatist, is the spokesman for this 'normal'state of affairs, which is what makes his conversation with Woland sointeresting. In it he is confronted with another reality which he cannotrecognize. He becomes 'unexpectedly mortal'. In the story of Pilate,however, a moment of recognition does come. It occurs during Pilate'sconversation with
Yeshua, when he sees the wandering philosopher's headfloat off and in its place the toothless head of the aged Tiberius Caesar.This is the pivotal moment of the novel. Pilate breaks off his dialogue withYeshua, he does not 'go over', and afterwards must sit like a stone for twothousand years waiting to continue their conversation. Parable cuts through the normality of this world only at moments. These moments are preceded by a sense of dread, or else by apresentiment of something good. The first variation is Berlioz's meetingwith Woland. The second is Pilate's meeting with Yeshua. The third is the'self-baptism' of the poet Ivan Homeless before he goes in pursuit of themysterious stranger. The fourth is the meeting of the master and Margarita.These chance encounters have eternal consequences, depending on the responseof the person, who must act without foreknowledge and then becomes theconsequences of that action. The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless,
who is there atthe start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and themaster, becomes the latter's 'disciple' and continues his work, is presentat almost every turn of the novel's action, and appears finally in theepilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of 'normal' reality, as ahistorian who 'knows everything', but each year, with the coming of thespring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks likefolly. Richard Pevear A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements At his death, Bulgakov left The Master and Margarita in a slightlyunfinished state. It contains, for instance, certain inconsistencies - twoversions of the 'departure' of the master and Margarita, two versions ofYeshua's entry into Yershalaim, two names for Yeshua's native town. Hisfinal revisions, undertaken in October of 1939, broke off near the start ofBook Two. Later he dictated some additions to his wife, Elena Sergeevna,notably the
opening paragraph of Chapter 32 ('Gods, my gods! How sad theevening earth!'). Shortly after his death in 1940, Elena Sergeevna made anew typescript of the novel. In 1965, she prepared another typescript forpublication, which differs slightly from her 1940 text. This 1965 text waspublished by Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967. However, the editorsof the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages. Thesecut portions immediately appeared in samizdat (unofficial Soviet'self-publishing'), were published by Scherz Verlag in Switzerland in 1967,and were then included in the Possev Verlag edition (Frankfurt-am-Main,1969) and the YMCA-Press edition (Paris, 1969). In 1975 a new and nowcomplete edition came out in Russia, the result of a comparison of thealready published editions with materials in the Bulgakov archive. Itincluded additions and changes taken from written corrections on otherexisting typescripts. The latest Russian edition (1990)
has removed the mostimportant of those additions, bringing the text close once again to ElenaSergeevna's 1965 typescript. Given the absence of a definitive authorialtext, this process of revision is virtually endless. However, it involveschanges that in most cases have little bearing for a translator. The present translation has been made from the text of the originalmagazine publication, based on Elena Sergeevna's 1965 typescript, with allcuts restored as in the Possev and YMCA-Press editions. It is complete andunabridged. The translators wish to express their gratitude to M. 0. Chudakova forher advice on the text and to Irina Kronrod for her help in preparing theFurther Reading. R. P., L. V. The Master and Margarita '... who are you, then?' 'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally worksgood.' Goethe, Faust
