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Introduction

Have you ever wondered how it went with the master and Margarita after they moved into their eternal home with the Venetian window and the twisting vine? Or what Woland and his retinue would do if they went to Moscow today and saw how the few free media are suppressed, how the  opposition is being muzzled and how fraud is committed during elections in the Russian Federation nowadays?

I admit, this last thought has crossed my mind a few times. I even had a title ready for my novel - Сын мастера [Syn mastera] or The master's son, but I have never succeeded in realising it. In addition to the fact that I feared that my imagination would not reach as far as Bulgakov's, there was also the sober conclusion that it would be impossible to get anywhere near his narrative art and style.

However, some people tried to write sequels of The Master and Margarita. Some made the master and his lover return to Moscow, others wrote about what would happen if Woland visited Moscow today. We found seven attempts. The strange thing is that all these works were presented by the publishing houses as sequels to The Master and Margarita, but that almost all authors denied it in interviews or in their prefaces.

Igor Aronov
An Incredible Bet

In An Incredible Bet or the Return of Woland from 2018, the author Igor Aronov claims, despite the title, that his book is not a sequel of the novel.

The story is about the devil Woland appears to Denis Svetlov, a Russian journalist, and makes him an offer: he can sell his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and a happy life. However, he does not really have the choice. When he refuses, he is doomed to die. Meanwhile, the master and Margarita live in their eternal shelter, but the details of their life together are both mystical and creepy.

ISBN 978-1387659944
Strelbitsky Multimedia Publishing House, 2018, 380 pages

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Lyudmila Boyadzhieva
The Return of the Master and Margarita

The heroes of this sequel from 2005 by Lyudmila Boyadzhieva (°1946) also live in their eternal shelter. For many years they lived a peaceful life, doing the most ordinary things and received guests.

One day Woland himself came to visit them. The lovers told him that they wanted to return to Moscow in order to experience the joy of meeting each other again. Woland agreed, but on condition that if they failed to meet each other a second time, they would be swallowed up by eternal darkness.

And so, in 1950, a boy and a girl are born - the new master and Margarita. They have to go a long way to meet with the love of their life.

ISBN 966-8400-26-7
Quadranal, 2005, 511 pages

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Victor Kulikov
The first of the first

In The first of the first, or the Road from Bald Mountain from 1995, written by the journalist Victor Kulikov (°1955), Woland returns to a film festival in the city of Tver in the mid-1990s. Margarita is an actress, the master is a film critic, and scenes in Tver are interspersed with scenes in Yershalaim.

The main characters are the wandering philosopher Var-Ravvan, based on the Yeshua Ha-Nozri character from The Master and Margarita, and the prostitute Anna.

ISBN 5-87091-024-2
IPP Prometheus, 1995, 281 pages

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Vitaly Ruchinsky
The Return of Woland

In 1993, Vitaly Ruchinsky (°1933) wrote The Return of Woland, or the New Devil, in which the heroes find themselves in the center of the events in Moscow in the 1990s.

Although the author’s style is very different from Mikhail Bulgakov’s, he tries to suggest similarities with The Master and Margarita. While Bulgakov based his his characters and places on real life prototypes from the Stalin era, Ruchinsky does the same with prototypes from the time of the perestroika.

The narrative ends with the failure of the August coup, a coup d'état against Mikhail Gorbachev, organised on August 19, 1991 by the so-called State Committee on the State of Emergency (SCSE), a group of eight high-level Soviet officials within the Soviet government, the Communist Party and the KGB. In Ruchinsky’s book, Woland with his retinue had a hand in defeating this group.

ISBN 5-87381-002-8
Russia - Great Britain, 1993, 320 pages

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Svyatoslav Supranyuk
A Leap in the Dark

In his foreword to the short novel A Leap in the Dark, or the Phantasmology of Hidden Knowledge from 1999, the science fiction writer and member of the Russian Union of Writers Alexander Orestovich  Khlebnikov writes that author Svyatoslav Supranyuk, having finished his service in the Armed Forces as the leading surgeon of one of the largest hospitals, had decided to systematize his archives, rough drafts of observations and thoughts, which resulted in the writing of this book.

Dnalov (Woland’s name, read the other way around), is an academician, Kotov-Begemotov is an executive director, and the main characters are the son of Ivan Bezdomny and the daughter of Annushka, who live in our time. They are trying to solve the eternal problems of good and evil and to give answers to the «cursed questions» over which people always struggle, by the artificial creation of perfect intelligence.

ISBN 5-88986-010-0
Petersburg writers, 1999, 160 pages

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Valery Ivanov-Smolensky
The Last Temptation of the Devil

In The Last Temptation of the Devil, or Margarita and the Master from 2007, author Valery Ivanov-Smolensky sends the inseparable trinity of Koroviev, Azazello and Behemoth to Jerusalem during the time of Pontius Pilate, by the will of the omnipotent Woland. Messire’s mission for his retinue is to find a Galilean preacher named Jesus of Nazareth.

In Moscow, the same characters have to fight the representatives of the almighty NKVD.

At the beginning of his book, Ivanov-Smolensky felt compelled to argue that «the plan of the great writer (Bulgakov)  is unknown, but it seems that the main characters of his novel were not the master and Margarita». Just like many other writers of sequels, he starts his book by saying: «This book was not conceived as a sequel of the famous novel ‘The Master and Margarita’» If that is true, one would of course wonder why he is using the same characters. I guess only the devil can tell.

978-9-85471-220-8
Adukatsy i vykhavanna, 2007, 320 pages

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Arnold Grigoryan
Follow-up visit

This is probably one of the rarest books from our collection. In 1999, Arnold Grigoryan (1927-1999), an author and screenwriter born in Yerevan, Armenia, published Follow-up Visit. The book is a collection of stories whose title story is a sequel to The Master and Margarita, situated in the nineties.

According to people who’ve read it, Arnold Grigoryan managed to get quite close to Bulgakov’s style, and therefore the book was recommended for reading. But finding it is quite difficult, since it was published in only 500 copies.

Of all the books I have described here, this is the only one that I would like to read. Unfortunately, it is also the only one that is not available online. Would thet be a coincidence?

5-88283-010-9
IPO Profiedat, 199, 304 pages