Which magical realist novel by Mikhail Bulgakov features a talking cat?

Mikhail Bulgakov’s magical realist novel featuring a talking cat is The Master and Margarita.

The cat is Behemoth, a huge black creature who can speak, walk on two legs, drink vodka, play chess, use firearms, and briefly take human form. He belongs to the supernatural entourage of Woland, a mysterious professor who is effectively Satan, during the Moscow sections of the novel.

Bulgakov uses Behemoth for comic disruption, but the character also helps establish the book’s strange moral universe. Behemoth’s jokes, theatrical behavior, and deliberate chaos expose the vanity and corruption of Moscow’s literary and bureaucratic elites. His name is linked both to the biblical monster Behemoth and to the Russian word for hippopotamus.

The novel alternates between 1930s Moscow and ancient Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate encounters Yeshua Ha-Notsri. That unusual structure is one reason the book is often described through several overlapping genres, including fantasy, satire, romance, and magical realism. It was written between 1928 and 1940 and published posthumously in a censored serial version in 1966–67.