Recommendations
Books Like The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil knows a hypocrite when he sees one
If you were captivated by Bulgakov's mixture of Soviet satire, fantastical comedy, and deep theological seriousness — these works share the same collision of the magical and the political, the same sense that the irrational is the only force capable of exposing an ideological lie.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Heart of a Dog
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov's satirical novella — the most concentrated expression of his comic-fantastical mode; a dog given a criminal's organs becomes a perfect Soviet bureaucrat.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Gogol's satirical novel — Bulgakov's primary Russian ancestor; the same comic energy applied to the provincial bureaucracy rather than the Soviet one.
- 3Buy on Amazon
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Zamyatin's dystopian novel — the first great Soviet satire; banned immediately, it directly influenced Orwell's 1984 and is the essential companion to reading Bulgakov.
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Buy on AmazonFaust
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's drama — Bulgakov's epigraph and the source of Woland; the novel is in constant dialogue with Faust's Mephistopheles and the question of evil that wills good.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's novella of a comfortable bureaucrat confronted with death and meaning — the opposite of Woland's lightness; the Russian canonical treatment of the spiritual emptiness Bulgakov satirizes.
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Buy on AmazonInfinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
Wallace's maximalist novel of addiction and entertainment — the closest American equivalent in its mixture of comic energy, philosophical seriousness, and satirical range.
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Buy on AmazonThe Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass
Grass's German magical realist novel — a child who refuses to grow up witnesses the rise of Nazism; the same blend of fantastical excess and historical horror as Bulgakov's Moscow.
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Buy on AmazonMidnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie's magical realist novel of Indian independence — the most Bulgakovian novel in English; the same mixture of historical satire and fantastical invention.
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