Banned Book Club: "The Master & Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Devil comes to Moscow in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a banned Soviet-era satire of power, censorship, and morality. The Banned Book Club is led by Bryn, dedicated to reading and protecting the most important and threatened books for our generation. This month, we’re reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — a wildly imaginative, darkly comic novel that blends political satire, supernatural chaos, and a love story unlike any other. When the Devil arrives in Soviet Moscow, accompanied by an eccentric entourage that includes a gun-toting, vodka-drinking black cat, he unleashes havoc on a city governed by bureaucracy, hypocrisy, and fear. Meanwhile, a persecuted writer known as the Master and his devoted lover, Margarita, find themselves caught in a fantastical struggle involving art, faith, freedom, and the nature of good and evil. Written during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union, The Master and Margarita was considered too politically and religiously provocative to publish in its entirety. Bulgakov worked on the novel until his death in 1940, but it did not appear in print until 1966, when a heavily censored version was published in a Soviet literary magazine. Its irreverent treatment of Soviet authority, religious themes, and artistic repression challenged the ideological constraints of its time. The novel's complicated publication history remains a powerful example of how censorship seeks to control not only what writers can say, but what readers are permitted to imagine. Absurd, subversive, and endlessly inventive, The Master and Margarita is both a celebration of artistic freedom and a fierce indictment of authoritarianism. It asks what happens when truth becomes dangerous, imagination becomes an act of resistance, and literature refuses to disappear. We will meet in person in the loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $19, which includes a copy of The Master and Margarita to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting. 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. In 1925 he completed the satirical novellaThe Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. This was one of the many defeats he was to suffer at the hands of his censors. 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. Stalin telephoned him personally and offered to arrange a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre instead. In 1938, a year before contracting a fatal illness, he completed his prose masterpiece,The Master and Margarita. He died in 1940. In 1966-7, thanks to the persistance of his widow, the novel made a first, incomplete, appearance inMoskva, and in 1973 appeared in full. ABOUT BOOK BANS: Books are under profound attack in the United States. PEN America's latest report, Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning, found that 6,870 books bans were enacted during the 2024-25 school year, across 23 states and 87 public school districts. And everywhere, it is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history. PEN America pushes back against censorship and the intolerance and exclusion that undergird it. Check out some frequently asked questions about book banning: https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questions/