'And so what did you say? ' asked Pilate. ' Or are you going to reply that you have forgotten what you said? ' But there was already a note of hopelessness in Pilate's voice.

'Among other things I said,' continued the prisoner, ' that all power is a form of violence exercised over people and that the time will come when there will be no rule by Caesar nor any other form of rule. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice where no sort of power will be needed.' 
'Go on!'
 'There is no more to tell,' said the prisoner. ' After that some men came running in, tied me up and took me to prison.'
--The Master and Margarita.


I arrived at Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, considered his masterpiece, after reading his The White Guard (Roger Cockrell's translation).
The Master and Margarita is a Beckettian kind of work. Will come to that later.

Bulgakov's style and motifs were not in tune with the proletarian values which the Communists inculcated.
The poet Anna Akhmatova talked of his "magnificent contempt" for their ethos, in which "everything had to be subordinated to the creation of a new, optimistic mentality which believed that science, medicine and Communism would lead to a paradise on earth for all, with humanity reaching its utmost point of development."