THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by M. Bulgakov

A classic of world literature - the NYT says about it in 2016:
„Were it a kinder world, Mikhail Bulgakov’s incandescent novel “The Master and Margarita” would be commemorating its 75th rather than 50th anniversary, for the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time — then concluding one of the most grotesquely violent decades in history — the fate of authors like Bulgakov was so precarious that he was fortunate to die of natural causes. Having finished the book, he reportedly said to his wife from his deathbed: “Now it deserves to be put in the commode, under your linens.” She did not even try to get it published. A censored version finally appeared in 1966-67.

The novel spans several spring days in 1930s Moscow during which the capital is visited by the Devil himself, trailed by a piebald entourage including an easily insulted giant cat with a fondness for vodka and guns. Registering himself as a foreign “artiste” specializing in black magic, Woland (as the novel’s Devil is known) proceeds to expose, via a series of séances at the Variety Theater, the greed and servility that rules even socialist Moscow. But this is a warm-up. Woland is in ­Moscow for Margarita, an unhappily married woman who once loved the Master, the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate’s consignment of Christ to the cross, chapters of which appear in Bulgakov’s novel. The Master burned most of the manuscript after it was turned down by a publisher and committed himself to a mental asylum. At Woland’s invitation, Margarita goes through hell — literally — to search for her beloved.“
So I invite you to read, re-read and discuss this great Russian novel with us.