The police are called, and Ivan is taken to Professor Stravinsky's mental hospital by Ryukhin. In the process he loses his clothes and causes a scene at Griboyedov's, where writers and critics have been waiting for Berlioz to start a meeting. Ivan is baffled and disoriented he decides to get to the bottom of the evening's strange events, and embarks on a mad pursuit after Woland, Koroviev, and Behemoth the tomcat around the city. Back in Moscow, Woland correctly predicts Berlioz's impending death by being beheaded by a streetcar. After being pressured by the high priest Joseph Kaifa, Pilate publicly condemns Yeshua to death. Yehudah had betrayed him in front of state authority. Pilate is questioning Yesha Ha-Nozri though he does not want to condemn Yeshua, he realizes he must after he asks Yeshua about his conversation with Yehudah of Kerioth. He challenges their atheism with a story, which is the reader's first introduction to Pilate's world. The novel begins on a Wednesday night in Moscow at Patriarch's Ponds, where Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz and Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev have a mysterious encounter with Professor Woland, who is the devil. In 1966-7, thanks to the persistance of his widow, the novel made a first, incomplete, appearance in Moskva, and in 1973 appeared in full.The Master and Margarita takes place in two worlds: Moscow, between Wednesday night and the following Saturday night, and Pilate's world, 2000 years before in Yershayalim, during Passover. In 1938, a year before contracting a fatal illness, he completed his prose masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. Stalin telephoned him personally and offered to arrange a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre instead. By 1930 Bulgakov had become so frustrated by the political atmosphere and the suppression of his works that he wrote to Stalin begging to be allowed to emigrate if he was not to be given the opportunity to make his living as a writer in the USSR. This was one of the many defeats he was to suffer at the hands of his censors. In 1925 he completed the satirical novella The Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916, but gave up the practice of medicine in 1920 to devote himself to literature. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky with an Introduction by Richard Pevear Read more Details Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will do anything to save the imprisoned writer she loves. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. 'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent Mikhail Bulgakov's devilish salute to artistic freedom, now in a beautiful clothbound edition
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