The Master and Margarita

Illustrations

Introduction

Many artists felt called upon to illustrate The Master and Margarita or to visualise scenes from the novel. Sometimes their work was made to illustrate a printed version of the book, but more often it were independent series of images which showed up in many different ways. On the internet, for example, or on the walls of places which were linked, in one way or another, to Bulgakov or the novel. Or in portfolio's, ex libris prints, or graffiti... there's a lot to choose from. I made a series of 33 gouaches myself, by the way - to illustrate my book with annotations to the novel.

The first one

The first illustrations for The Master and Margarita known to me date from 1958, which is eight years before the novel was first published - albeit heavily censored. It's is a series of black-and-white drawings made by Aleksander Aleksandrovich Melik-Pashaev (°1941).

When Melik-Pashaev was born, Mikhail Bulgakov had been dead for a year. But his parents were good friends with the author and his wife Elena Sergeevna (1893-1970). They were both connected to the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow. Father Aleksander Shamilyevich Melik-Pashaev (1905-1964) was a conductor, and mother Minna Solomonovna Shmelkina (1909-1995) danced as a ballerina in the theatre'sballet.

After the death of Mikhail Bulgakov, the Melik-Pashaev family remained friends with Elena Sergeevna, and that's how Aleksander Aleksandrovich could read the manuscript of The Master and Margarita when he was 14 years old. Three years later, when he was a student at the renowned studio school of the Moscow Art Theater MKhAT, he started making a series of illustrations for the novel. He worked on it from 1958 to 1961.

Afterwards, Melik-Pashaev made quite a big turn in his career. He started studying psychology at the age of 34 through a postgraduate course. With success, because in 1994 he was promoted to Doctor in Psychology and became a specialist in the field of creative development of children with more than 140 scientific publications to his name.

I do not have enough images of the illustrations by Melik-Pashaev to devote a page to it, but on the right you can see how he saw the scene at the Patriarch's ponds.

The others

The quality of the illustrations is uneven. A common characteristic is the love of the artist for the novel, but it's not always expressed in a talented way. Everyone to his own taste, of course, and that's why I will also add series which I didn't like too much myself.

My personal favorites are the black and white drawings of the Russian artists Pavel Orinyansky and Boris Markevich and the New Zealander Charlie Stone, the colour illustrations of the Russian artists Nikolay Korolev and Aleksandr Vygalov, the Polish illustrator Marcin Minor and Chilean Parisian Pedro Uhart. Among the photographers, I just love the Russian Elena Martynyuk and the Ukrainian Retro Atelier and I also enjoyed the series which the French photographer Jean Daniel Lorieux made with Isabelle Adjani as Margarita. Finally, a final word of praise for the Swede Jan Persson who made a 55-meter drawing on a wall of a shopping center in Gothenburg.

Sergey Litvinov

You can't get enough of it? Just try the website of Sergei Litvinov, a young Russian from Rostov-on-Don, who is continuously searching the internet to find new illustrations of The Master and Margarita.

Click here ti visit Sergey Litvinov's website