The Master and Margarita is a fantasy satirical novel published by his wife twenty-six years after his death, in 1966, that has granted him critical immortality. The book was available underground, as samizdat (“sam”+ “izdat” – “self-published”, Vladimir Bukovsky defined it as “I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and [may] get imprisoned for it”), for many years in the Soviet Union, before the serialization of a censored version in the journal Moskva. A destroyed manuscript of the Master is an important element of the plot, and in fact Bulgakov had to rewrite the novel from memory after he burned the draft manuscript with his own hands.
The novel is a multilayered critique of the Soviet society in general and its literary establishment specifically. It begins with Satan visiting Moscow in the 1920s or 30s, joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil.
It then evolves into an all-embracing indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Soviet Russia. Banned but widely read, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov’s place among the pantheon of great Russian writers.
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