A fierce satire, filled with dazzling surreal humour 20021018

'A stunning, superb allegorical novel...Bulgakov is one of the greatest modern Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent 'It is a hymn to the imagination' Desmond O'Grady 'This book is absorbing, brilliant slapstick, and looks deep in to the heart of fantasy and longing' Sunday Times 'A masterpiece...a classic of twentieth-century fiction' New York Times

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to write some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. After a lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime, he died impoverished and blind in 1940, shortly after completing his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. None of his major fiction was published during his lifetime.