Bulgakov burned his masterpiece, just as his hero the Master does
In 1930 Mikhail Bulgakov threw the first draft of his novel about the devil in Moscow into the fire, convinced he had no future as a Soviet writer. He started again, kept revising until weeks before his death in 1940, and never saw it printed. Readers only met Woland and his talking cat decades later.
Bulgakov trained as a physician before turning to plays and fiction, and settled in Moscow in 1921. He began The Master and Margarita in 1928, destroyed it in 1930, and resumed in 1931. A second draft of 1936 fixed the main plot, and four more versions followed. When he stopped writing, four weeks before he died, some sentences were still unfinished. Along the way he asked Stalin for permission to leave the country; the request was refused, and that bitterness seeps into the portrait of the Master.
The book runs on two tracks. In 1930s Moscow, Satan arrives as Professor Woland with a retinue that includes Behemoth, a huge black cat, and the hitman Azazello. They humiliate the literary bureaucrats of Massolit, stage a black magic show at the Variety Theatre where conjured cash and clothes later vanish, and leave the city blaming hypnosis. Alongside runs a story set in Jerusalem, in which Pontius Pilate reluctantly condemns Yeshua Ha-Notsri; it turns out to be the novel the Master wrote before critics crushed him. Margarita, his lover, becomes a flying witch and hosts Satan's ball to win him back.
Some critics see the novel as a retort to militant Soviet atheism, especially the anti-religious verse of Demyan Bedny. Others stress its autobiography: the fêted young poet Ivan and the shunned Master mark two poles of how the state treated writers. Satan's ball may owe something to a real party. On 24 April 1935 Bulgakov attended a lavish spring festival at Spaso House, the residence of US ambassador William Bullitt, which featured a birch forest indoors, a hundred zebra finches borrowed from the Moscow Zoo and a baby bear.
Publication was a saga of its own. Moskva magazine ran a censored text in 1966 and 1967 with about 12 percent removed, and a smuggled manuscript became a book in Paris in 1967. Missing passages circulated by hand as samizdat. The first complete Russian edition appeared in 1973, yet with so many drafts no single version can claim to be definitive.
Source: The Master and Margarita
