Introduction
Moscow is a complicated city. A city as a confusing drama with a dark and absurd intrigue. It's a spectacle full of surprises. The city and the life in it are closely connected.
Buildings from different eras are standing next to each other, often in a chaotic way. As if they want to emphasize the incoherence - and not the coherence - of the different epochs.
Those words were once written by the Russian translator Dmitri Silvestrov, and they illustrate perfectly why the story of The Master and Margarita could only happen there.
Bulgakov's major talent is in how he is capable to transform his impressions and deceptions into satire. He works secretly on The Master and Margarita during the repression 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 houses are fictitious only on the face of things. Sometimes it's a piece of cake to find out about what Bulgakov is talking, but sometimes it needs more insight - which we want to offer with this website.
In this part of the website we're looking for similarities with real locations and buildings. In the section Characters we do the same for the people described in the novel.
You can use the menu on the right for a stroll in the city of the master.
The Pashkov House
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.
