Ahead of its day or behind the times?: The Master and Margarita

Either Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" was ahead of its day or behind the times - I can't (yet) say which. Written about 1940, last work by Bulgakov, not published (in Soviet Union) till 1963 - and if you look at it as a work from 1963 it seems kind of old-hat - yet another experimental weirdo surrealist novel with a devil as the main character and with journeys through time and space (the 2nd chapter is a narrative describing Pilate's interrogation of Jesus, which the Devil character, generally referred to as the foreigner, claims to have witnessed; in 3rd chapter the Foreigner witnesses one of his predictions coming true - one of the literary Russians he's befriended dies by a beheading - so what does all this mean? who knows?) - but as a work from 1940, especially in Soviet Russia, The M & M is sort of progressive, not politically but artistically - though, granted, Gorky and Gogol, earlier in the century, had done some explorations of the surreal and the macabre (The Overcoat, The Nose, e.g.) - so how to place Bulgakov's novel - for a reader today? Clearly, it's not as shocking or unusual as it must have been to its first readers, and it's not as powerful a political artifact as it must have seemed in 1963 - a lost and suppressed voice rising up from the grey Soviet empire. Though in first three chapters parts are pretty funny in an odd way, not sure where Bulgakov is going with the narrative and not sure if he'll carry me with him over 400 pages, but I'll stay with it for a while out of curiosity about this literary oddity, if nothing else.