Master and

[lsanderson]

Russians Await a Cult Novel's Film Debut With Eagerness and Skepticism
By PAUL SONNE

MOSCOW, Dec. 18 - Sixty-five years after Mikhail Bulgakov's death, his novel "The Master and Margarita" has yet to lose its cultlike ability to capture readers with its mystical exploration of text, truth and a bargain with the devil for the sake of love.

Despite what has been called a curse over film adaptations of the novel and doubts about the possibility of representing the narrative's fantastical elements convincingly on the screen, an 8 hour and 40 minute television version is to begin on Monday; it is the first Russian adaptation of a story that, for many, has a supernatural presence of its own.

"For the Soviet or Russian person, meeting with Bulgakov's novel in 1966 was a taste of freedom," said Roman Yerikalov, the director of the Bulgakov House Cultural Center in Moscow. "It was contact with an unknown world. No one had written like he did, and the reader found himself in a world that no one before Bulgakov had dared to enter."