The Master and Margarita Read Online Free

‘self-baptism” of the poet Ivan Homeless before he goes in pursuit of the mysterious stranger. The fourth is the meeting of the master and Margarita.
    These chance encounters have eternal consequences, depending on the response of the person, who must act without foreknowledge and then becomes the consequences of that action.
    The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the master, becomes the latter’s ‘disciple” and continues his work, is present at almost every turn of the novel’s action, and appears finally in the epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of “normal” reality, as a historian who “knows everything”, but each year, with the coming of the spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly.
    Richard Pevear

    A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements

    At his death, Bulgakov left The Master and Margarita in a slightly unfinished state. It contains, for instance, certain inconsistencies – two versions of the ‘departure” of the master and Margarita, two versions of Yeshua’s entry into Yershalaim, two names for Yeshua’s native town. His final revisions, undertaken in October of 1939, broke off near the start of Book Two. Later he dictated some additions to his wife, Elena Sergeevna, notably the opening paragraph of Chapter 32 (“Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth!”). Shortly after his death in 1940, Elena Sergeevna made a new typescript of the novel. In 1965, she prepared another typescript for publication, which differs slightly from her 1940 text. This 1965 text was published by Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967. However, the editors of the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages. These cut portions immediately appeared in samizdat (unofficial Soviet ‘self-publishing”), were published by Scherz Verlag in Switzerland in 1967, and were then included in the Possev Verlag edition (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969) and the YMCA-Press edition (Paris, 1969). In 1975 a new and now complete edition came out in Russia, the result of a comparison of the already published editions with materials in the Bulgakov archive. It included additions and changes taken from written corrections on other existing typescripts. The latest Russian edition (1990) has removed the most important of those additions, bringing the text close once again to Elena Sergeevna’s 1965 typescript. Given the absence of a definitive authorial text, this process of revision is virtually endless. However, it involves changes that in most cases have little bearing for a translator.
    The present translation has been made from the text of the original magazine publication, based on Elena Sergeevna’s 1965 typescript, with all cuts restored as in the Possev and YMCA-Press editions. It is complete and unabridged.
    The translators wish to express their gratitude to M. O. Chudakova for her advice on the text and to Irina Kronrod for her help in preparing the Further Reading.
    R. P., L. V.

    T HE M ASTER AND M ARGARITA

“... who are you, then?”
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
Goethe, Faust[1]

* Book One *

C hapter 1. Never Talk with Strangers

    At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds.[2] One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neady shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.
    The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz,[3] editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary