Mikhail Bulgakov

‘I don’t even have an ass, Hegemon,’ he said.

One is the much-quoted ’Manuscripts don’t burn‘, which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus become a watchword of the intelligentsia

This moment of fear, however, brings me to the second aphorism — ’Cowardice is the most terrible of vices’ — which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel.

Bulgakov’s gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.

Once terror is identified with the world, it becomes invisible.

Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction, the most ordinary mythology.

‘Pardon me,’ the stranger responded gently, ‘but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time.

Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period—well, say, a thousand years—but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’

In realizing this translation, we strove, first of all, to produce what has been lacking so far: a translation of the complete text of Bulgakov’s masterpiece into contemporary standard American English.