The Master and Margarita

This edition (Classic Wisdom Reprint) is non-censored, based on a samizdat version and translated in Russia by an unknown translator.
Widely held as one of the best novels of the 20th century the book depicts a story in a story, a manuscript of a Biblical story that the Master cannot publish and locked up in the asylum for.

The story concerns a visit by the devil to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. The Master and Margarita combine supernatural elements with satirical dark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying a singular genre.

Literary critic, assistant professor at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Nadezhda Dozhdikova notes that the image of Jesus as a harmless madman presented in ″Master and Margarita″ has its source in the literature of the USSR of the 1920s, which, following the tradition of the demythologization of Jesus in the works Strauss, Renan, Nietzsche, and Binet-Sanglé, put forward two main themes - mental illness and deception. The mythological option, namely the denial of the existence of Jesus, only prevailed in the Soviet propaganda at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.