One spring afternoon at Patriarch's Ponds, the Devil arrives in atheist 1930s Moscow. Calling himself Professor Woland and travelling with a grotesque retinue — a fast-talking valet, a hitman, a naked witch, and an enormous, insolent black cat named Behemoth — he sets about exposing the greed, vanity, and cowardice of the Soviet literary establishment through a series of increasingly outrageous pranks and disappearances.
Braided through the mayhem are two other stories: that of the Master, a broken writer confined to an asylum after his novel was rejected and destroyed, and of Margarita, the married woman who loves him and will make a bargain with dark powers to get him back. And within the Master's own manuscript unfolds a third narrative — Pontius Pilate's fateful encounter with a wandering philosopher named Yeshua Ha-Notsri in ancient Jerusalem.
Written in secret under Stalin and unpublished in full until decades after Bulgakov's death, The Master and Margarita is a wild, funny, and profound satire of tyranny and hypocrisy that moves between slapstick and the sublime. Its blend of magic, philosophy, and blistering comedy has made it one of the great novels of the twentieth century.