Were it a kinder world, Mikhail Bulgakov’s incandescent novel “The Master and Margarita” would be commemorating its 75th rather than 50th anniversary, for the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time — then concluding one of the most grotesquely violent decades in history — the fate of authors like Bulgakov was so precarious that he was fortunate to die of natural causes. Having finished the book, he reportedly said to his wife from his deathbed: “Now it deserves to be put in the commode, under your linens.” She did not even try to get it published. A censored version finally appeared in 1966-67.

The novel spans several spring days in 1930s Moscow during which the capital is visited by the Devil himself, trailed by a piebald entourage including an easily insulted giant cat with a fondness for vodka and guns. Registering himself as a foreign “artiste” specializing in black magic, Woland (as the novel’s Devil is known) proceeds to expose, via a series of séances at the Variety Theater, the greed and servility that rules even socialist Moscow. But this is a warm-up. Woland is in ­Moscow for Margarita, an unhappily married woman who once loved the Master, the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate’s consignment of Christ to the cross, chapters of which appear in Bulgakov’s novel. The Master burned most of the manuscript after it was turned down by a publisher and committed himself to a mental asylum. At Woland’s invitation, Margarita goes through hell — literally — to search for her beloved.

But this tells you nothing. “The Master and Margarita” is one of those novels that, even in translation, make you feel that not one word could have been written differently. I’ve read it half a dozen times now, in three translations and in the original, and its mystery has only increased. It’s like those 10-ruble notes that Woland rains down on his audience at the Variety — they change into bottle labels the next day. You try to hold the novel’s face, and it turns away once again.

With his plays mostly banned, Bulgakov used every freedom inside the covers of ­“Margarita,” and its pages bristle with a deeply informed indifference to every dogma, whether historical, religious, political or artistic. ­Bulgakov’s earthbound Christ ignores the mythology of the Gospels and Soviet atheism both, as does a Satan figure who is munificent and majestic rather than petty and evil. The Pilate narrative is equally dark on the rules: It migrates from one teller to another, from speech to novel inside a novel to dream. Few novels have incorporated fantastical elements into straight realism, the absurd into the sane, as hilariously and boldly as this one. (Long before there was Latin American magic realism, there was Soviet magic realism. It was a lot funnier.)