Introduction
Bulgakov's major talent is in his capability to transform his impressions and deceptions into satire. He works secretly on The Master and Margarita during the ongoing repression in the Soviet Union in the thirties. It turns into a glorification of freedom and a gorgeous love story, but also into a book by which he took revenge on the soviet literators for thwarting him. No wonder that many characters, locations and situations are fictitious only on the face of things. Sometimes it's a piece of cake to find out about whom Bulgakov is talking, but sometimes it needs more insight.
The Master and Margarita is loaded with interesting, comical, touching, intriguing and sometimes absolutely disgusting characters.
Many of those characters are based on real life prototypes who were playing an active role as censors of literary works or in the arrests of the writers in the Soviet Union. For some characters Bulgakov was inspired by people of his own direct environment, and others just got names referring to traits the author didn't really appreciate.
Click on the menu icon on the right to read more on the real people who were the prototypes of the characters in The Master and Margarita. In the section Locations we do the same for the places and the buildings described in the novel.
English subtitles
All films based on The Master and Margarita have been subtitled by your webmaster in English, French, Dutch, German, Spanish and Italian. Click on the link belw to find them.
