This book's use of fantasy elements to satirize social behavior is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's timeless Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872). Bulgakov actually references these works at the beginning of chapter eight when Ivan finds a cylinder in the mental ward labeled "Drink," similar to the mysterious bottle labeled "Drink Me" that Alice encounters at the start of her journey in Wonderland.

Many of Bulgakov's concepts, particularly his portrayal of Woland, the devil, are directly inspired by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part poem Faust (published in 1808 and 1832), which Goethe wrote over a span of fifty years.

Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses caused an uproar upon its release in 1988, leading an Iranian religious leader to place a bounty on the "blaspheming" author's head. Rushdie himself acknowledged the parallels between his book and The Master and Margarita, noting that "the echoes are there, and not unconsciously." Much like Bulgakov's work, it retells an ancient religious story within a modern narrative.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist from the generation following Bulgakov, grew up under the repression of Lenin's reformed government. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was expelled from Russia in 1974 for criticizing the official government system. Critics regard some of his early fictional works about the Soviet regime as his most impactful, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The First Circle (1968).

Critics have noted that the contemporary trend of "magical realism" in fiction shares much in common with The Master and Margarita. This style has been particularly prominent in Latin America since the 1960s, in the works of writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The most celebrated novel in this genre is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.