«Мастер и Маргарита» на английском языке с переводом

The Master and Margarita '... who are you, then?' 'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'

Goethe, Faust

Never Talk with Strangers

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds.

One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size.

The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, [2] editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, called Massolit [3] for short, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym of Homeless. [4]

Once in the shade of the barely greening lindens, the writers dashed first thing to a brightly painted stand with the sign: `Beer and Soft Drinks.'

Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening.

There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street.

At that hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was empty.