THE MASTER AND MARGARITA: 50th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

‘Cowardice is the most terrible of vices’—which

The thought that there is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason?

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.

‘Manuscripts don’t burn’,

manuscripts don’t burn.’