A lite romp through Moscow, with parlor magicians, keystone cops, and a cat as big as a pig that swills vodka. Or, a tale of desperation, chronicling black magic, the disappeared, the beheaded, and a cat as big as a pig waving a Mauser pistol around. A novel within a novel tells of the author’s struggles to write a novel accepted by official society. And contained within is a novel about the doubt of Pilate and the death of Yeshua.

Telling three interlocking stories; of the Devil coming to Moscow, of the crucifixion of Christ, and the love story of The Master and Margarita, this is one of the greatest pieces of 20th-century literature, being an allegory for the reign of Stalin and his purges, and of hope during that period of crushing oppression. It is, at heart, a novel of dissidence.

As these three stories interlock, Satan comes to Moscow and wreaks havoc, Margarita pines for her lover and is all too willing to make a deal with Satan to be reunited, and the Master’s great novel of Pilate is the cause of his being imprisoned, we come to the real heart of the matter, that Soviet Russia has no sense of godliness or its inverse, evil. And thus Satan is able to cause so much damage, Stalin is able to cause so much damage. For this is what the novel is really about. Written during the height of Stalin’s purges; the midnight knock of the NKVD, the Gulag archipelago, the mass unmarked graves.

Bulgakov, a former doctor reduced to writing for the theater, one of the lowest literary jobs, due to his past, wrote the novel in secret, and at one point burned his notes. Indeed, it wasn’t published until the sixties, and even then, in an expurgated form, chopped up by the state decades after his death. The allegories were still too strong, the wounds still too deep. Russia, even during the Soviet era, is a land of novels, its people well read and used to tales that are curated to survive officialdom. They are used to allegory and satire, and when it was finally published in the west many of these traits were lost on the readers there.

No one knows how many versions there are, nor is there an official version. But all of them, well translated or bad, contain in them the marks of a sad genius, who only really gave us this one memorable work. A novel about resilience in the face of your utmost nightmare, on both the immediate level via The Master and on the ultimate level, that of The Christ. It’s funny. It’s not so funny.

So, what are you reading?