The Greatest 20th-Century Russian Novel Finally Gets a Film Version Worthy of It
The new adaptation of ‘The Master and Margarita’ feels especially subversive in Putin’s increasingly totalitarian Russia.
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S CULT NOVEL The Master and Margarita, published in two issues of the literary magazine Moskva in 1966 and 1967—a quarter century after the author’s death, and after a long and hard battle with censors—had an electrifying effect on the Soviet reading public in the increasingly repressive climate that followed the removal of Nikita Khrushchev. Despite cuts eliminating or mutilating the most heretical passages, the novel’s principal themes, including the crushing of literature by ideological diktat and the constant chill of fear amid the omnipresence of the secret police, remained resonant and defiant. Now, a new film version seems to be having a similar bombshell effect under a new, post-Soviet repressive regime, in Vladimir Putin’s wartime Russia.
Bulgakov’s novel is a masterpiece: a stunningly multilayered work of fantasy and magical realism, savage political and literary satire, and transcendent romance, with an excursion into history and Christian mythos. For an in-depth analysis, you might check out the essay I wrote about it for the Weekly Standard a few years ago, but here’s a quick summary of the plot: One fine day in the mid-1930s, the Devil arrives in Moscow undercover, with a congeries of colorful minions, to acquaint himself firsthand with the Soviet project. The results are uproariously funny, sometimes terrifying, and often both—starting with the opening chapters in which “Professor Woland,” a “foreign consultant” specializing in black magic, debates two atheism-preaching Soviet propagandists on a park bench, mocking their assertion that “man himself” is in charge of the world. Puncturing the illusion of human control, Woland predicts that one of his interlocutors, a smug magazine editor, will die by beheading that very day; the editor and his pal laugh at the crazy professor, but the grisly prophecy promptly comes true under the wheels of a streetcar. Other adventures follow in which Woland and his retinue sow chaos and mete out less lethal but memorable punishments.
This darkly comical deviltry soon starts to overlap with another, tragic story, that of “the Master,” a nameless writer self-exiled to a mental hospital after being relentlessly hounded and briefly imprisoned as a suspected dissident, and his unhappily married lover, Margarita, who will do anything to save him—even sell her soul to the Devil. Meanwhile, the Master’s novel, condemned as an insidious attempt to sneak religious propaganda into Soviet publishing, provides us with yet another storyline, a book-within-the-book set in first-century Jerusalem and partly narrated by Woland as incontrovertible fact: the encounter between Pontius Pilate and the strange itinerant preacher Yeshua Ha-Notzri, one of the Talmudic names for Jesus. Toward the end, all three storylines converge as Woland reunites the Master and Margarita, granting them an idyllic eternity together, and allows the Master to release Pilate from his prison of immortal remorse.
The cultural resonance of The Master and Margarita, which had 26 translations just between its magazine publication and the 1973 Soviet publication of the uncut text in book form, has been huge—not only in Russia but worldwide, despite the book’s very Russian and even Soviet specificity. Overall, it has been translated into more than 40 languages, often more than once—perhaps because the subtlety, grace, and lushness of Bulgakov’s Russian makes it especially challenging to capture the effect in another language (there are six English translations alone). It has been adapted for stage countless times across continents: in Russia, in Eastern and Western Europe, in China, in Australia, and of course in the United States. (British dramatist Edward Kemp’s stage adaptation had a successful run at the Constellation Theatre in Washington, D.C. five years ago.) There have also been at least five previous film versions, including a 1972 one by the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda that focused solely on the Pilate storyline. In Russia, a ten-part miniseries written and directed by Vladimir Bortko was a big television event in 2005, an incredibly liberal time by today’s standards; it had and still has many fans but has also been widely criticized as overly literal and pedestrian.
THE NEW MASTER AND MARGARITA MOVIE had a rocky road to the screen—though, obviously, not as rocky as the original novel’s road to publication in Soviet Russia. Reports of a Hollywood production of a Master and Margarita film, with a Russian producer, first surfaced in 2016. In December 2019, Australian film director and producer Baz Luhrmann of The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge fame, apparently a great fan of the novel, signed on to direct. Then came COVID-19. After delays, Russian-American director Michael Lockshin took the helm, with partial financing from Russia’s State Cinema Fund; at one point, the working title was Woland, but later the decision was made to revert to the iconic title of the novel. The film was shot in Russia in 2021 and reportedly edited in the United States. According to Variety, there was a deal for Universal Pictures to distribute the film outside Russia—until Putin decided to invade Ukraine, upending everything.
As some Russian commentators have noted, the country in which the film was released last month is drastically different from the one in which it was shot. In 2021, Russia was an authoritarian and repressive society but one in which significant pockets of freedom remained intact; people who wanted to stay away from politics, including artists and writers, were largely able to do so, and even open dissent was grudgingly tolerated as long as it did not cross certain boundaries. By 2024, the Putin regime has virtually completed its evolution toward totalitarianism. In the words of Ivan Nekrasov, a correspondent for MSK1, one of the more liberal news sites still functioning inside Russia:
The main surprise was how relevant the film was today. If the film had been released, as planned, in 2021, then the story of a writer driven mad by censorship and by duplicity in the corridors of power would not have had such a strong resonance. Bans on novels by once-established writers, the yanking of controversial plays from theatrical productions, “demonic” elite parties—you can hardly tell that the source material was written almost a hundred years ago.1
Lockshin has echoed this theme. As he recently recounted to the independent Russian news site Meduza, when he and his crew started shooting the film in 2021, they saw Putin’s Russia “cosplaying the 1930s more and more” and thought of the film partly as a warning about the dangers of creeping totalitarianism. Then, while the film was in post-production, he had the eerie experience of watching the warning turn to reality: “Naturally, I never thought that we would so quickly get to the point where we are today—that the movie would become so relevant.”
The release of the film in this setting has been remarkable in at least two ways. First, Lockshin himself has been an open critic of the war; he can get away with it as a U.S. citizen and, currently, a U.S. resident. (Lockshin’s personal history is remarkable by itself: In 1986 when he was 5, his father, American biochemist and far-left activist Arnold Lockshin, made waves by defecting to the USSR, reversing the trajectory of his ancestors’ flight from Russia to the United States. Michael Lockshin, who told Meduza he hasn’t spoken to his father in twenty years, eventually made the journey back but says that he feels equally at home in both cultures and considers himself “cosmopolitan,” not Russian or American.) Second, of all of the novel’s themes, those of the repressive state, of enforced conformity, and of the artist unpersoned for dissent are the ones most powerfully highlighted in the film.
Lockshin, who co-wrote the screenplay with Roman Kantor, changes the Pilate story from a novel to a play (a move also made in the Kemp stage adaptation and in the 1972 Italian-Yugoslav film version by Aleksandar Petrović—which Lockshin says he hasn’t seen). The Master’s Pilate script is printed in a magazine and greenlit for theatrical production, but then abruptly banned, already in dress rehearsal, as ideologically harmful; in a compelling visual, the sets are dismantled and carted away. As in the novel, he is relentlessly vilified in the Soviet press; but the film also dramatizes the persecution through a Writers’ Union meeting that turns into a gleeful public shaming. (As exiled writer Dmitry Bykov has strikingly put it, the film’s Soviet world is a perverse world of “joyless festivities and festive repressions.”) The Master’s play is denounced as pernicious and dangerous; his sanctimonious persecutors assure him that they want to help him. As a coup de grâce, magazine editor Mikhail Berlioz—the very one who will lose his head under the streetcar—stands up to express contrition for publishing the Pilate script and promises to recall the issue, despite having assured the author that the play is guaranteed a large readership even if banned from the stage. Later, the “cancellation” culminates in the writer’s ejection from the swanky Writers’ Union restaurant after the manager gets word that his membership has been terminated.
(The relevance of these scenes is heightened by the fact that the attacks on the play focus less on the religious content—no longer taboo in post-Communist Russia—but on the heresy of Yeshua’s condemnation of coercive state power. Then again, in today’s Russia where Orthodoxy is the new party line, the Master’s play could have been nixed for its unorthodox Jesus.)
Lockshin departs from the original in even bolder ways. The film’s conceit is that The Master and Margarita’s supernatural storyline—the one where the Devil comes to Moscow—is really a novel the Master writes, first in his cozy semi-basement apartment with Margarita as his muse and reader, then at the mental hospital. (This concept is revealed right away: the film’s opening scene in which Margarita, now an invisible flying witch, trashes a particularly vile critic’s apartment—one of the novel’s most memorable moments—cuts to the Master writing that scene at the clinic.) The Master’s novel skewers his tormentors and adds some revenge fantasy; it imagines the Devil and his familiars wreaking havoc on a city mired in repression, fear, and conformity; and it gives the writer and his beloved a happy ending. In other words, the Master in the film The Master and Margarita is writing the eponymous novel—a conceit underscored by actor Evgeniy Tsyganov’s physical resemblance to Bulgakov. It is a “meta” treatment of a novel that famously already has strong “meta” elements: Margarita is partly an avatar of Bulgakov’s third wife Elena, who labored tirelessly to get the novel published years after his death and helped finalize the text from his notebooks; the Master’s burning of his Pilate manuscript during a mental breakdown parallels Bulgakov’s immolation of his novel about the Devil in Moscow, an early version of The Master and Margarita, during a depressive episode brought on by his hounding.2
Should we conclude, then, that according to the 2024 film, its main story happens only in the hero’s head? That Woland is just an eccentric visiting German who befriends the Master and serves as his model for the all-powerful Prince of Darkness? That the Devil’s Ball where Margarita plays Woland’s queen to earn the Master’s release is only a fantasy she feverishly reads in her lover’s manuscript while waiting to die from sleeping pills mixed with wine? That the heroes get no reward and the bad guys get no comeuppance? If so, that certainly weakens the message of the triumph of art, love, and freedom and arguably makes the film far more downbeat than the book. But then, the novel itself suggests at one point, in seeming contradiction with other passages, that the Master and Margarita are dead at the end. And if the novel is ambiguous, so is the film. As it goes on, fantasy and reality seem to meet and merge—until, in the final minute, a riveting twist which recalls one of the novel’s iconic lines—“Manuscripts don’t burn”—strongly suggests that the Devil and his retinue are real after all: perhaps real all along, perhaps called into existence by the novel itself.
A NUMBER OF RUSSIAN COMMENTATORS, including Bykov, have praised the Lockshin film for choosing fidelity to the spirit, not the letter, of the Bulgakov classic. Film critic Anton Dolin has even called it the first Master and Margarita screen adaptation that works. Fans of the novel may deplore the drastic paring down of the Jerusalem storyline, or of the comedy hijinks involving Woland’s crew and the antics of the huge, sassy talking cat Behemoth, a fan favorite here rendered in CGI. But for a two-and-a-half hour adaptation of a 400-page book, the film gives far more than it takes away. There’s the expanded role of Aloysius, the Master’s friend who betrays him to the authorities to get his apartment. There’s the inspired decision to turn the Woland gang’s “black magic show” at a variety theater into an interruption to regularly scheduled programming—namely, a Soviet musical, Forward to the Future, which imagines the glories of communism in . . . December 2022. (Having Woland’s buffoonish minion Koroviev transformed into a Joker-like figure for the stage act also works very well.)
There is also the enhancement of 1930s Moscow with grandiose futuristic buildings from never-realized Soviet architectural projects, making Stalin’s city even more inhuman: In the words of veteran Russian film critic Alla Gerber, a “triumph of totalitarian evil [and] totalitarian madness” which crushes and traps the individual. At the end, as in one of Bulgakov’s drafts, a fire started by Behemoth engulfs the entire city while Woland, his minions, and the reunited lovers stand on a hilltop watching the blaze.
There is, finally, the superb casting. Actors Tsyganov and Yulia Snigir, married in real life, have not only chemistry but a palpable tenderness as the Master and Margarita. The baddies are as odious as they should be. The Danish actor Claes Bang, best known to American audiences for his turn as Dracula in the Netflix miniseries reimagining the vampire, here makes a fine Pilate, despite getting very little screen time. And the German actor August Diehl (Inglorious Basterds) finally creates a Woland who is mesmerizing and, well, devilish. Menace, charisma, fire, icy intelligence, and yet a core of honor and generosity underneath the cold sarcastic exterior—he’s got it all. Somebody give this guy a Woland spinoff.
WHEN THE HOTLY ANTICIPATED FILM was released in Russia on January 25, it quickly became a big hit. However, it also drew the attention of Russian propagandists, who noticed not only the director’s previously stated opposition to the war in Ukraine but the film’s own subversiveness. Notably, Lockshin’s name does not appear on the film posters or in the titles in Russian release, a measure one Russian film blogger described as “overcautious”; nonetheless, the director’s erasure did not satisfy the culture police.
Fellow film director Tigran Keosayan, a Putin admirer, wrote on his Telegram channel that if Lockshin had “expressed anti-Russian views” and donated to the Ukrainian armed forces, “we need to seriously sit down and figure out what to do about this . . . starting with the producers and ending with law enforcement agencies.” (In fact, Lockshin has apparently donated to Ukrainian charities, not the military.) The ominous call to “figure out” what to do about Lockshin was echoed by Keosayan’s wife, the notorious propagandist Margarita Simonyan, on Vladimir Solovyov’s nightly television show. Solovyov himself delivered one of his trademark sneering diatribes:
Right now everyone is discussing a piddling little director who made a movie, partly with American money, partly—for some reason he got [Russian] state funding—based on a great Russian classic, I’m not going to name the one. . . . And, what’s more, done in a stridently pamphlet-like style, with an anti-Soviet, anti-modern-Russia theme. What’s more, he also donates to the [Ukrainian Armed Forces]. And our attitude is: well, all right. Seriously?
(The “piddling little director” had actually made the highly successful 2020 period romance The Silver Skates, the first Russian-language Netflix original that did very well in both the United States and Europe.)
Writer and war hawk Zahar Prilepin charged that the Russian State Cinema Fund, which had helped finance the film, had been hijacked by “Russophobic” liberals. Meanwhile, a group of “patriotic” “Christian” activists demanded that Lockshin be charged with spreading “fake news” about the Russian army—and added to the registry of extremists and terrorists.
As Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, put it on his YouTube channel: Bulgakov really knows how draw out the forces of darkness for a party. You could also say the attacks on the film add another layer of “meta”-ness: the howls of, “How could they allow this movie to get released?” closely echo the moment in the film in which a dour critic inquires, “How did it happen that the reactionary play Pilate was able to make it into print and onto the stage?” It’s a remarkable achievement, a movie that already has baked into it a proleptic rebuttal to the objections of its critics.
That such a film would come out in Russia at such a time has also shocked some liberal commentators: Novaya Gazeta columnist Anatoly Shavrey calls it a “miracle,” comparable to the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the Soviet Union in 1962. Shavrey also sees the film as nothing less than “a knife in the back of Russian propaganda.” To Shavrey and many others, The Master and Margarita’s massive box-office success, aided by the backlash—the Streisand effect works in Russia, too!—and by fears that it may be pulled from distribution, are signs that millions of Russians are chafing at authoritarianism and starved for free and truth-telling art. (As Bulgakov wrote, in another famous line that made it into the film: “To tell the truth is easy and pleasant.”)
Unfortunately, the fallout from Putin’s war may keep The Master and Margarita from reaching American audiences outside special screenings and pirated copies (though Lockshin told Meduza he is hopeful about the film’s prospects for release in the West). But could the fallout from this film help shake Russian society out of its stupor? Could the cultural needle be moved away from Putinism by this story in which, as the critic Alla Gerber has noted, the city of monstrous tyranny burns down but the free man’s writing proves indestructible?
One can always hope that the magic will work. Bykov has semi-ironically argued that the film’s theme of fantasy bleeding into reality may already be coming true: Last week, a residential building in northern Moscow that had once been a Writers’ Union co-op and is still known as “the writers’ house” was partly destroyed in a massive blaze, an eerie reflection of the fire that consumes the writers’ association headquarters in the Bulgakov novel and (eventually) all of Moscow in the Lockshin film. And this, Bykov mischievously pointed out, just as an illustrious foreign visitor—Tucker Carlson—flies out of Moscow. Granted, Tucker doesn’t quite measure up to the Prince of Darkness; but who knows, perhaps Woland’s subversive spirit isn’t far away.
Nekrasov’s mention of “‘demonic’ elite parties” is an allusion to the scandal around the “almost naked party” at a nightclub hosted by blogger Anastasia Ivleeva in late December, attended by actors, pop singers, and various minor celebrities. After photos were posted to social media, an outcry ensued in Kremlin-loyalist circles about a supposed affront to morality and patriotism, with resulting “cancellations” (actor/singer Filip Kirkorov was cut from a film in which he had a supporting role) and even a prosecution for public indecency. The art/life intersection is indeed uncanny: At the “Devil’s Ball” in The Master and Margarita, the female dress code involves full nudity plus shoes and jewelry in the book, near-nudity in the film.
It should be said that the Master’s fate does not quite replicate that of his creator: Bulgakov was never arrested, and his play The Days of the Turbins, controversial for its sympathetic portrayal of counterrevolutionary “White Guards,” was viciously trashed by some Soviet critics but remained on the stage—partly because Joseph Stalin was, incongruously, a fan.