I was helping the firemen, Messire,” replied Korovyev, indicating his ripped trousers. “Ah, if that’s the case, then of course, a new building will have to be built.
What am I crying for, when I’ve got some wine?
Very well then,” replied the guest, and said weightily and distinctly: “Yesterday at Patriarch’s Ponds you met with Satan.
There’s no need for you to intercede for him, Margarita, because the one with whom he so sought to talk has already interceded for him.
These sorrowful musings on my imperfection were nothing compared to the awful realization that I had gained precisely nothing from reading the books of the very best writers; no avenues had opened up, no light gleamed ahead and it had done nothing but depress me. Wormlike, the awful thought began to gnaw at my heart that I should never make a writer.
Allow me to ask you, then, how man can govern if he cannot plan for even so ridiculously short a span as a thousand years or so, if, in fact, he cannot guarantee his own next day?
Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?
I have just been cut in half by a streetcar at Patriarch’s. Funeral Friday 3PM. Come. Berlioz.
The movies are a woman’s only solace in life.
And to the revenge – on the hacks, the yes-men, the snitches, the hypocrites – that the novel declines to rise above.
The pantry was cool and smelled of mice and boots.
The monthly magazine Moskva, otherwise a rather cautious and quiet publication, carried the first part of The Master and Margarita in its November 1966 issue.
There isn’t a single eastern religion,” said Berlioz, “in which, as a rule, a chaste virgin doesn’t give birth to a god. And without inventing anything new, in exactly the same way, the Christians created their Jesus, who in reality never actually lived. And it’s on that the main emphasis needs to be put...
The White Guard, written in the twenties and dealing with the nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of war in all of literature.
One is the much-quoted ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion.
Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928.
She gave a little jump and hung in the air a little way above the rug, then she slowly began to be drawn downwards and dropped...
These words, which do not appear in the definitive text, tell us how painfully Bulgakov weighed the question of cowardice and guilt in considering the fate of his hero, and how we should understand the ending of the final.
He’s already the devil knows where!
Bulgakov’s gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.