The Master and Margarita - Opening

BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I

Never Talk With Strangers

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plum, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

'... who are you, then?'
'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'

Goethe, Faust

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group

First published as Master i Margarita in serial form in Moskva, 1966-7
This translation published in Penguin Books 1997

Text copyright Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966, 1967
Translation, Further Reading and Notes copyright Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997
Introduction copyright Richard Pevear 1997
All rights reserved

Set in 10/12pt Monotype Garamond
Printed in the United States of America