SOURCE: Delaney, Joan. “The Master and Margarita: The Reach Exceeds the Grasp.” Slavic Review 31 (1972): 89-100.

In the following essay, Delaney questions the meaning of the Master figure in Bulgakov's novel, arguing against a Faustian interpretation.

When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works.¹ On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers...