Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) was a doctor, a novelist, a
playwright, a short-story writer, and the assistant director of the
Moscow Arts Theater. His body of work includes The White Guard, The
Fatal Eggs, Heart of a Dog, and his masterpiece, The Master and
Margarita, published more than twenty-five years after his death
and cited as an inspiration for Salman Rushdie's The Satanic
Verses.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (translators) have
translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, and
Pasternak. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club
Translation Prize, for their translations of Dostoyevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Pevear, a native of
Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married and live in
Paris.
Boris Fishman (foreword) is the author of two novels, A
Replacement Life, which was one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable
Books of 2014 and won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the
American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My
Baby Do Rodeo. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared
in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the London Review
of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Fishman
has taught at Princeton University and New York University. Born in
Minsk, Belarus, he moved to the United States at age nine and now
lives in New York.
Christopher Conn Askew (cover illustrator) is a painter and
tattoo artist whose illustrations have appeared on the covers of
books, albums, and magazines. He lives in Los Angeles.
“My favorite novel—it’s just the greatest explosion of imagination,
craziness, satire, humor, and heart.” —Daniel Radcliffe
“From the first page I was immediately beguiled, leading me to my
year of reading Bulgakov, drawing me to venture to Moscow to seek
out the landmarks in the book, and the author’s grave, which is
steps away from the grave of Gogol.” —Patti Smith, The New
York Times Book Review
“Nude vampires, gun-toting talking black cat, and devil as ultimate
party starter aside, the miracle of this novel is that every time
you read it, it’s a different book.” —Marlon James, “My 10
Favorite Books,” in T: The New York Times Style Magazine
“I read it first as an 18-year-old and, just like a meteor from a
distant galaxy, it hit my tender young brain and dug its way deep
into its gray material. It has nestled there ever since, radiating
with beauty and wonder, irony and horror.” —Sjón, Vulture
“One of the truly great Russian novels of [the twentieth] century.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“By turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative, and poignant . . .
A great work.” —Chicago Tribune
“A soaring, dazzling novel; an extraordinary fusion of wildly
disparate elements. It is a concerto played simultaneously on the
organ, the bagpipes, and a pennywhistle, while someone sets off
fireworks between the players’ feet.” —The New York Times
“Fine, funny, imaginative . . . The Master and Margarita stands
squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative.”
—Newsweek
“A wild surrealistic romp . . . Brilliantly flamboyant and
outrageous.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Beautiful, strange, tender, scarifying, and incandescent . . . One
of those novels that, even in translation, make one feel that not
one word could have been written differently . . . Margarita has
too many achievements to list—for one thing, a plot scudding with
action and suspense, not exactly a hallmark of Russian literature.
. . . This luminous translation [is] distinguished by not only the
stylistic elegance that has become a hallmark of Pevear and
Volokhonsky translations but also a supreme ear for the sound and
meaning of Soviet life. . . . It’s time for The Master and
Margarita to rise to its rightful place in the canon of great world
literature. . . . As literature, it will live forever.” —Boris
Fishman, from the Foreword
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