The Translations on the Table
Mikhail Bulgakov completed The Master and Margarita in successive drafts between the late 1920s and 1940, the year of his death. It circulated in samizdat before a censored version appeared in the thick journal Moskva in 1966–67; the full text did not appear in Russian until 1973. English readers have had several versions to choose among: the 1967 Mirra Ginsburg translation, the 1967 Michael Glenny rendering published by Collins and Harvill, the 1997 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation from Penguin, and the 2008 Hugh Aplin version for Oneworld Classics. Each reflects the moment of its making and the priorities of its translator.
Three Passages, Four Readings
The novel's famous opening — "В час жаркого весеннего заката на Патриарших прудах появились два гражданина" — sets an atmospheric register at once. Pevear and Volokhonsky follow it closely: "At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds." The other translators each recast the sentence in their own way.
The difference is not trivial. Bulgakov's sentence is plain and exact, setting the time and place before the characters appear. How a translator handles that word order and those modest adjectives shapes the novel's tone before the reader has turned a page.
The second passage worth examining is Woland's address to the Variety Theatre audience in chapter twelve. The scene requires the prose to modulate between showman's patter and cold menace. Glenny's Woland is theatrical and slightly stiff. Pevear and Volokhonsky give him rhythmic sentences that land more like a stage performance; Aplin leans toward plainness, keeping the menace in the situation rather than the syntax. Which approach serves Bulgakov's comedy of horror depends on what a reader thinks The Master and Margarita primarily is: a satirical entertainment, a philosophical allegory, or a novel haunted by suppression.
The third passage is the Yershalaim sections — Bulgakov's reimagining of Pilate and Yeshua — where the prose is stripped, almost biblical in cadence. Here Pevear and Volokhonsky attract the familiar charge of register literalism: their syntax can mirror Russian sentence structure in ways English does not naturally accommodate, producing a certain deliberate strangeness. Aplin's equivalent passages read with more syntactic ease but less foreignness. Ginsburg, working from an incomplete base text unavailable in full until after her publication, necessarily differs in content as well as style.
What the Differences Amount To
No English Master and Margarita is simply right or wrong. Glenny was working with a text that had not yet been fully restored; Ginsburg with the same limitation. Pevear and Volokhonsky had the advantage of the authoritative Russian edition established by scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, as did Aplin. The novel's publication history confirms the textual situation: what readers have called "the complete text" stabilised only after decades of editorial work in Russia.
A reader wanting the version closest to contemporary scholarly consensus on the source text should look to Pevear and Volokhonsky or Aplin. A reader wanting a version that reads with the most transparent English prose will find Aplin's choices generally suit that preference. What Glenny's 1967 translation still demonstrates is how durably readable a version can be even when its base text was incomplete — and how much of Bulgakov survives translation altogether.