manuscripts don’t burn

The Russian playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 – 1940) is now widely acknowledged as one of the giants of twentieth-century Soviet literature, ranking with such luminaries as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. In his own lifetime, however, a casualty of Stalinist repression, he was scarcely published at all, and his plays reached the stage only with huge difficulty. His greatest masterpiece The Master and Margarita, a novel written in the 1930s in complete secrecy, did not appear in print until more than a quarter of a century after his death. It has since become a worldwide bestseller