Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita [100 Great Books]

Manuscripts don't burn

Mikhail Bulgakov spent the last twelve years of his life writing and rewriting a novel he knew Stalin’s Soviet Union would never print. He dictated final revisions to his wife from his deathbed in 1940, blind and dying, still refining sentences for a book that would stay locked in a drawer for another twenty-six years. A literary journal serialised it, in censored form, only in 1966 and 1967. By then Bulgakov had been dead for a quarter of a century, and the Soviet readers who encountered his Devil for the first time understood at once that they held something the state had tried to make impossible. Bulgakov built one of the funniest novels of the twentieth century and, in the same motion, mounted a sustained act of defiance against a regime that had made honest speech a capital risk.

Bulgakov trained as a physician in Kyiv, then abandoned medicine for literature during the Russian Civil War. Through the 1920s he wrote plays and stories that Soviet critics savaged for their irreverence toward the new order. The state banned his work from the stage, blocked his exit from the country, and reduced him to poverty. In 1930, desperate, he wrote directly to Stalin asking either to be allowed to work or to be allowed to leave. Stalin telephoned him personally and arranged him a job at the Moscow Art Theatre, which kept him alive while keeping him leashed. Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in these conditions, a man composing his masterpiece in secret while the government that controlled his livelihood watched him closely. He poured his whole predicament into the manuscript, and every joke in it carries the pressure of that captivity.