Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at
the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the
master, becomes the latter's 'disciple' and continues his work, is present
at almost every turn of the novel's action, and appears finally in the
epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of 'normal' reality, as a
historian who 'knows everything', but each year, with the coming of the
spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like
folly.
Richard Pevear
A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements
At his death, Bulgakov left The Master and Margarita in a
slightly
unfinished state. It contains, for instance, certain inconsistencies - two
versions of the 'departure' of the master and Margarita, two versions of
Yeshua's entry into Yershalaim, two names for Yeshua's native town. His
final revisions, undertaken in October of 1939, broke off near the start of
Book Two. Later he dictated some additions to his wife, Elena Sergeevna,
notably the opening paragraph of Chapter 32 ('Gods, my gods! How sad the
evening earth!'). Shortly after his death in 1940, Elena Sergeevna made a
new typescript of the novel. In 1965, she prepared another typescript for
publication, which differs slightly from her 1940 text. This 1965 text was
published by Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967. However, the
editors
of the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages. These
cut portions immediately appeared in samizdat (unofficial
Soviet
'self-publishing'), were published by Scherz Verlag in Switzerland in 1967,
and were then included in the Possev Verlag edition (Frankfurt-am-Main,
1969) and the YMCA-Press edition (Paris, 1969). In 1975 a new and now
complete edition came out in Russia, the result of a comparison of the