The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, and the foremost of Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order. Bulgakov started writing the novel in 1928. He burnt the first manuscript of the novel in 1930, seeing no future as a writer in the Soviet Union. The work was restarted in 1931. In 1935 Bulgakov went to Spaso House, the residence of U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union William... Bullitt, which was transformed by Bulgakov into the ball of the novel. The second draft was completed in 1936 by which point all the major plot lines of the final version were in place. The third draft was finished in 1937. Bulgakov continued to polish the work, aided by his wife, but was forced to stop work on the fourth version four weeks before his death in 1940. A censored version of the book was first published in Moscow magazine .
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| Author: | Mikhail Bulgakov |
| Genre: | Novel, Speculative fiction, Romance novel, Satire, Farce |
| Year published: | 1967 |
| Number of editions: | 31 |