the master and margarita by mikhail bulgakov

At the end of the year I could read the language but by then I had come to the conclusion that people who make out that “literature is so much better in the original” are just idiots who want you to know how clever they are to have mastered a language.

At this point I was nowhere near able to start a book in Russian, let alone finish one. I read it in translation, a Harvill Secker paperback with a picture on the cover of the graffitied stairwell of the Moscow block where Bulgakov lived. These are the desperately pathetic but so important little moments in life that make you think: “Maybe I can do this very difficult thing after all.” (To give you some idea of what a big deal this was, Crime and Punishment is Prestupleniye i Nakazaniye.) Soon afterwards I discovered the Russian word for picnic was “piknik” and felt as if I had cracked the Enigma code. I now realise I was probably drawn to The Master and Margarita because its title is virtually the same in Russian as it is in English (“Master i Margarita”) and it gave me a boost that finally I could understand a book title without thinking about it.

And that I really wanted to be able to talk to the people for whom this book was everything and to try to understand something about their lives. This book made me realise I was not going to give up. I was teaching English (very badly), barely coping with temperatures of -15C and fighting a losing battle with the Russian language. W hen I first heard of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita it was 1993 and I was living in St Petersburg during my university year abroad.

The master and margarita by mikhail bulgakov