Hugh A. Aplin Boeken

This is a fully annotated translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov's exuberant comic masterpiece. A literary sensation from its first publication, The Master and Margarita has become an astonishing publishing phenomenon in Russia and has been translated into more than twenty languages, and made into plays and films. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is now considered one of the seminal works of twentieth-century Russian literature. In this imaginative extravaganza the devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic results of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the world capital of atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital. By turns acidly satiric, fantastic and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first century Jerusalem. The commentary and afterword provide new insight into the mysterious subtexts of the novel, and here The Master and Margarita is revealed in all its complexity. --back cover

One of the great achievements of 20th-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues —the culmination of a life’s work of unrelenting challenge to Soviet dogma—took Bunin’s poetic mastery of language, eventually known for its richness as "Bunin brocade," to new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades, this collection of short fiction centers around dark, erotic liaisons. Love in its many varied forms is the unifying motif in a rich range of narratives, characterized by the evocative, elegiac, elegant prose for which Bunin is rightly renowned.

Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country's poultry stocks, Persikov's discovery is exploited as a means to correct the problem. As foreign agents, the state and the Soviet media all seize upon the red ray, matters fet out of hand... Set in 1928 but written four years earlier, during Stalin's rise to power, The Fatal Eggs is both an early piece of science fiction reminiscent of H.G. Wells and a biting, brilliant satire on the consequence of the abuse of power and knowledge.

The five, irreverent, satirical and imaginative stories contained in 'Diaboliad' caused an uproar upon the book's first publication in 1925. They move at dizzying speed from grotesque satire to science fiction, from the plainest realism to the most madcap fantasy.