The world-famous novel The Master and the Marketer, on which the Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) began work at the end of the 1920s and which he finished, completely exhausted and almost blind, only a few days before his death, belongs to the golden fund of world literature and is rightly considered one of the most remarkable literary works of the 20th century. Although it began to be born almost a hundred years ago, it is a work that is still alive - a work that continues to charm and even fascinate the reading public for many generations.
The Master and Margaret can be characterized as a multi-layered magical-realistic fantasy grotesque set in the completely real – and from today's point of view, completely absurd – conditions that prevailed in the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. It can be read as a masterful satire on the order of the times, but also as an ingenious variation on a Faustian theme, a peculiar philosophical allegory and, above all, as a captivating story of the never-ending clash of good and evil, guilt and innocence, courage and cowardice, which gives us not only an extraordinary reading experience, but it also invites us to look for answers to the basic questions of human existence together with the author.
Mikhail Bulgakov did not see the publication of his masterpiece, the novel was first published a quarter of a century after his death, moreover in a truncated and censored form.
The book is translated by our leading Russian scholar Alena Morávková, who has been consistently dealing with Bulgakov's work since the sixties of the last century. Her translation, which was first published in 1969 and went through seven re-editions, was the first ever translation using the uncensored wording of the work within the countries of the former Eastern Bloc.
The new edition is supplemented by almost two hundred paintings by Iwan Kulik.