Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has a quality of rich complexity, the veins of which are still being explored. Both the novel's form and its themes mark it out as a unique masterpiece; parallels are hard to find either in Russian literature or in any West European traditions. This need not cause the critic to despair about finding the right slot in which to fit the work; it may be, indeed, that such an undertaking is doomed to prove unproductive. As one recent commentator on the novel has remarked:

While the work proclaims its individuality and resists attempts to find for it ancestors in earlier writings or siblings in contemporary texts, its thematic intricacy raises so many urgent questions demanding analysis and interpretation that the problem of genre recedes to a position of secondary importance.