The Master and Margarita, and the devil in Moscow

The devil arrives in Moscow, and the city — so sure of itself, so officially atheist — has no framework for him at all. That's the joke, and it's a deadly one: a regime that has outlawed the irrational is helpless before it.

Behemoth, the enormous pistol-toting cat, is one of literature's great creations, but the novel keeps pivoting to ancient Jerusalem and the weary, sleepless Pontius Pilate, and the two registers rhyme in ways that take a second reading to feel.

Manuscripts don't burn.

Bulgakov wrote it in secret, burned a draft, rewrote it from memory, and died before it could be published. That history is inside the book — the line about manuscripts is a prayer as much as an aphorism.

It's a carnival and an act of defiance at once. You laugh the whole way through and only afterward notice what it cost to write.