The Master and Margarita as a Product of its Literary Precursors

My previous post discussed the first category of Bulgakov scholarship, which focuses on the novel as Bulgakov’s personal commentary of Soviet life. I divided theme into five categories to show the various ways scholars explored The Master and Margarita this topic. This post continues to the second category of Bulgakov scholarship: The Master and Margarita…

Scholarly Interest in The Master and Margarita: Overview

Twenty-six years after Bulgakov’s death, the literary journal Moskva (known for publishing writers suppressed during the Stalinist era) published The Master and Margarita in two installments, the first in November 1966 and the second in January 1967.[1] “‘[U]nlike’” anything published during the four previous decades of Soviet Literature, and “unlike” any contemporary literature as well,…

Introduction: Born from Regression

The catalyst for Bulgakov’s investigation into Christianity, and his desire to write about Christ and the devil, appears to be a May 1926 incident during which the Soviet secret police known as the OGPU (Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye or Joint State Police Directorate) searched his apartment and confiscated three notebooks of journals and his manuscript…

Overview

On 24 August 1929, Soviet playwright and author Mikhail Afansievich Bulgakov (1891-1940), who wanted nothing more than success as an artist, wrote his brother that his “destruction as a writer had been accomplished [moe pisatel’skoe unichtozhenie]” [1]. Only three years before, after initial Soviet censorship clamped down on his work, Bulgakov began researching Christianity and…