The Master and Margarita

As a satirical fantasy, The Master and Margarita resists the tidy constraints of any single genre. Bulgakov had finished the novel in 1940, but it would only be released in 1966—well after Stalin’s death. Even so, its uncensored version didn’t appear in the mainstream literary market until 1973. The novel owed much of these publishing delays to its subversive satire about the Soviet regime. Accompanied by a motley retinue with a talking tomcat and half-nude women, the Devil wreaks havoc upon Moscow while cleverly exposing the many failings of Soviet society—moral, institutional, and otherwise. Emcee heads get cut off, theater directors vanish, poets roam the streets in their underwear. The novel’s absurdity and devilish antics stage an unsubtle, darkly humorous criticism of the regime in which Bulgakov had imagined them.