Master and Margarita

Kalinovsky’s Master and Margarita feels like a visual echo of Bulgakov’s novel — complex, polyphonic, and impossible to pin down. He didn’t try to create one “key” for the whole book; instead, he approached each layer — Jerusalem, Moscow, the love story, the demonic carnival — as a world with its own rhythm and tone.

The scenes of Yeshua and Pilate are quiet, stripped of mysticism, almost historical. Kalinovsky saw Christ not as a divine figure, but as a wandering teacher — fragile, human, and close to the democratic spirit of antiquity. The drawings are cool and clear, done in pencil and watercolor, as if time itself had slowed down.

Moscow, on the other hand, bursts into motion — grotesque, chaotic, full of sharp humor. Kalinovsky called it a “bala­gan,” a carnival of devils and bureaucrats, drawn with biting irony and a touch of sadness. His Voland isn’t the elegant Satan of popular imagination, but something colder: a worn, abstract force of destruction.

Even in the wildest scenes — the flight of Margarita, the infernal ball — his work keeps a sense of structure and music. He spoke of “hearing the timbre” of each episode while drawing: quiet and slow in one, noisy and electric in another. That musical sensitivity turns his illustrations into a score, sometimes soft, sometimes dissonant, always alive.

Kalinovsky’s Master and Margarita isn’t about explaining the novel. It’s about listening to it, and catching, on paper, its strange and beautiful noise.