The Books of My Life: A Reader's Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

Since its publication in the Soviet journal Moskva in 1966 and 1967 Mikhail Bulgakov's book for the drawer, The Master and Margarita, has become a cause celebre. The book's fame soon led to graffiti appearing in the stairwell in the house on Sadovaya ulitsa leading up to the apartment where Bulgakov once lived on the fourth storey, songs loosely based off of it such as "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, albums named after characters within it such as Patti Smith's Banga, and the celebration of one of its catch phrases, "manuscripts don't burn" particularly by Soviet dissidents. Today, as recent polls have affirmed again and again, The Master and Margarita is one of the most popular books among Russians. Pretty good for a book that its author thought might never be published and which may never have seen the light of day if not for Bulgakov's relatives, particularly his widow, Yelena Sergeyvena Bulgakova.

Bulgakov was a late comer to literature. He was born in Kyiv to an intellectual family in 1891. His father Afanasy was a professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy and he graduated from the Medical Faculty of Kyiv University and even practised, as did Anton Chekhov, for a little while in the Russian "sticks", an experience that resulted in a series of related stories being published under the title A Young Doctor's Country Notebook. Though Bulgakov published a book, White Guard (1925), a novella, Fatal Eggs (1925), and had a few of his plays put on, most famously his theatrical adaptation of White Guard, The Days of the Turbans, at the famous Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Dancehnko, where he worked for a time thanks to the intervention of Yosif Stalin, during his lifetime, many of Bulgakov's works, including The Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov worked on between 1928 and 1940, and A Dog's Heart (1925), could not be published in the USSR until after the Thaw and the period of glasnost and perestroika initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Master and Margarita, with its magical, satirical, and comic tale of the devil's visit to Stalin's Moscow, its realist tale of the confrontation between Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ga-Nostri in Yerushalaim, and its tale of the love between the Master and Margarita, which brings the other strands together, has not only been a cause celebre in bohemian, dissident, and popular culture. It has stimulated a wealth of literature on both the book and the author of the book in the halls of academe. Julie Curtis's A Reader's Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (Boston: Academic Studies Press, Companions to Russian Literature series, 2019) is one of the latest. Curtis, who has written extensively on Bulgakov and Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, explores the broader economic, political, and cultural contexts, literary contexts, influence history, textual history, genre history, narrative structure, characters, Soviet and Russian publication history, and English translation history, though Curtis misses Michael Karpelson's translation of Bulgakov's book, provides readers with an excellent introduction to both Mikhail Bulgakov and his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.

For those looking for a book on the state of The Master and Margarita art written for a broad intellectual audience, I highly recommend Curtis's monograph. For those who are reading or who have read The Master and Margarita and are looking for a guide that will help them better understand the cultural and literary background of The Master and Margarita, I highly recommend Curtis's book. For those interested in Russian and Soviet cultural and literary history in general, I highly recommend Curtis's monograph. For those of you who have not yet read The Master and Margarita, I recommend that you read it, particularly if Gogolesque satire, carnavelesque, and humour, Tolstoyan like realism, and a deep humanism, are your cup of tea.