Stone Village Pictures recently announced that they are developing a screen adaptation of The Master and Margarita, the Russian literature masterpiece by Mikhail Bulgakov. In charge of the project: Scott Steindorff, who also produced adaptations of The Human Stain and Love in the Time of Cholera.

A forbidden manuscript, an accursed poet, a controversial subject…It is no wonder that Hollywood producers are taking an interest in adapting this work. In fact, the story behind the book is itself a novel. In 1930, two years after Bulgakov achieved its redaction, it was burned in a stove. He tried to re-write it but died in 1940 before managing to do so. It was in the hands of his wife (who inspired the Margarita character) that The Master and Margarita was completed. She finished her husband’s work a year after his death, but a first edition of the novel only came out in 1967, mutilated by the censor. It was only in 1989, 50 years after the novel was first completed, that a full version of the text was published and Bulgakov rehabilitated.

But the curse of The Master and Margarita doesn’t stop here. The text is still the source of much passion. The satire used by Bulgakov in describing a much humanized Satan arriving in the young USSR, at once critic of the communist’s extreme atheism and of religion, still provokes very violent reactions. In 2006, Bulgakov’s flat in Moscow–now converted into a museum and which strongly inspired Satan’s flat in the novel–was damaged by a religious fanatic neighbour who believed The Master and Margarita was an apology of Satan…

Still, even religious extremists can’t deny that the novel is extremely well written and composed. The Master strongly reminds one of Bulgakov himself, a writer stuck in the eternal cycle of destruction and reconstruction of his own masterpiece. Bulgakov alternates the narration and pieces of the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate, yet overall, it remains highly coherent. It’s genius.

In 1980, Roman Polanski tried to adapt The Master and Margarita, but Warner interrupted the project. Let’s hope the movie won’t have the same destiny than that of the book and will be completed before 2050! Until then -if you haven’t done so already- I’d strongly advise you to jump into this incredible book, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Image courtesy of Masterandmargarita.eu