The Master and Margarita. The Master and Margarita (Russian: «Ма́стер и Маргари́та») is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written between 1928 and 1940 but unpublished in book form until 1967.
It is woven around a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, and the foremost of Soviet satires. In part, it is angled against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order. The Master and Margarita. Why would the devil pay a visit to a contemporary city, and what sort of business would he conduct there?
What seems a fanciful premise was perhaps less so for a persecuted writer in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Mikhail Bulgakov completed his novel The Master and Margarita just before his death in 1940, but it remained officially unpublished until 1966, whereupon it achieved the status of an underground masterpiece. In the book's first chapter, the devil appears briefly to Berlioz, a literary magazine editor, as "a transparent citizen," a "phantasm" (p. 8) that disappears after Berlioz closes and opens his eyes.
Then, in the midst of a conversation between Berlioz and Ivan, a poet, about whether Jesus was real or fictitious, the devil appears to both of them and joins their conversation, looking only unusual enough to be thought "a foreigner" (p. 10).