  the master and margarita () is a novel by mikhail bulgakov, written between 1928 and 1940 but unpublished in book form until 1967. the story concerns 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, as well as the foremost of soviet satires. in part, it is an outcry against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order. == history == bulgakov started writing the novel in 1928. he burned 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 the spaso house, the residence of u.s. ambassador to the soviet union william bullitt, which was transformed by bulgakov into the walpurgis night 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. there would follow four other versions. bulgakov stopped writing four weeks before his death in 1940, leaving the novel with some unfinished sentences and loose ends. a censored version, with about 12 percent of the text removed and still more changed, was first published in moscow magazine (no. 11, 1966 and no. 1, 1967). the ymca press in paris, best celebrated for publishing the work of aleksandr solzhenitsyn
Literature_featuring_anthropomorphic_characters Novelistic_portrayals_of_Jesus Novels_first_published_in_serial_form Novels_published_posthumously Novels_set_in_Moscow Novels_set_in_the_Stalin_era Russian_comedy_and_humour Russian_novels_adapted_into_films Satirical_novels Soviet_novels Works_by_Mikhail_Bulgakov Works_originally_published_in_Russian_magazines