I see a great deal about "The Master and Margarita" these days; I once wrote a note on the subject:

On the whole, "The Master and Margarita" is less about mysticism than about people who have got stuck in some other time. Or perhaps it is the novel itself that has got stuck in the wrong time? In the Silver Age, for instance. Otherwise it would be hard to make out what the author meant to say.

Few people now remember how the serial version of the novel appeared in the magazine Moskva. Even then the notion took hold that the author was a great fantasist who knew how to write with originality. But look closer and this is not quite true.

In essence, the text grew out of a competition for the best work about the devil, in which a good many capable people took part, Kuzmin and Remizov among them. All the more so since, strictly speaking, the author of this novel, so to say, did not write it at all, for he had died. He died without finishing it or arranging the chapters and separate pieces into a whole. That work was done by his widow.

Which, when you think about it, explains why the novel seems to fall apart into four parts. The first is the demonology of the Silver Age. The second is the literature of the 1920s, supplying the love line. Kamensky's story "Summer", for example, about an engineer's wife who receives guests naked, that is, in nothing but her knickers. And then there is another part of the novel, the story of Yeshua, which is of course the typical drama of Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, "The King of the Jews", staged with magnificent sets. The last part of the novel is a not especially merry satire, sending us back to the newspaper Gudok, where all the phantoms of this "Bulgakovism" worked: Ilf, Petrov, Olesha, Kataev and Bulgakov himself. But this line is of no great value in the novel; the author never finished it.

For some reason many failed to see this, and took the novel for a new Gospel altogether, which it of course never pretended to be.