Yee Fui recommended this to me, and had she not done so, I think it's eminently possible that I'd never have read it. I'm very glad that I did, though; herewith an (edited) extract from an email I've just written to her, since it pretty much captures my initial response to the novel:
... "The Master and Margarita", which I finished yesterday and really loved. At first, while reading it, my predominant response was one of simple pleasure at the gleeful anarchy wrought by Woland and co (of which co Behemoth is, as I mentioned to you the other night, definitely my favourite - I was always going to like The Cat, but what a cat Behemoth is!) - it's such a joy to read, and all the better that the targets of this havoc should predominantly be the literary and artistic set and its numerous functionaries and hangers-on (at first, the proliferation of characters - all with Russian names, natch - bewildered me a bit, but I'd more or less found my feet by the end). As it went on, though, the metafictional aspects became more apparent ('the master', hah!), and of course I enjoyed them, too.
... [Woland] strikes me more as a Stalin figure; even so, given that a key aspect of both regimes was, I'm pretty sure, the suppression of religion (qua opium of the masses a la Marx, I presume), it seems odd that the Stalin-figure should be incarnate as the (Christian) devil (not to mention one who eventually seems to serve the ends of good by both reuniting the master and Margarita, and liberating Pilate). Still, a certain ambiguity seems central to the book - which probably allows it to skewer as many targets as it does, and in such wickedly sharp fashion, too. Of course the best thing about "The Master and Margarita" is how crazy and skewed and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny it is ...
This is one book that I definitely want to re-read in the nearish future (though I don't know if the pressures of coursework/thesis-writing and the constant thrill of the new will actually allow me to do so); a second reading would allow me to pay more attention to the nuances and perhaps read it more critically (maybe with some kind of commentary to help me work out the particular social context in which it was written). In particular, I'd want to think about it more in political terms, which would in turn necessitate knowing a bit more about 20th century Russian politics...
