The Devil in Moscow: The Master and Margarita

It begins with a conversation in a Moscow park—two men debating the existence of God. One is a poet, the other a literary bureaucrat. And the third? The Devil, of course. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, first published posthumously in 1967 after years of Soviet censorship, the Devil arrives in Stalinist Moscow with a talking cat, a murderous sidekick, and a plan to expose the hypocrisies of a society that has tried to stamp out the soul. The result is one of the strangest, boldest, and most darkly comic novels of the 20th century: a literary Russian doll…