Facts about The Master and Margarita
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A censored version of The Master and Margarita first appeared in the Soviet literary journal Moskva in 1966–1967, with roughly a tenth of the text removed by editors.
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Bulgakov spent approximately 12 years developing The Master and Margarita across multiple manuscript versions before his death, with major revisions occurring during the late 1930s and 1940s.
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Ivan Homeless's notebook containing the Master's unpublished novel becomes a central plot device that drives the narrative tension throughout The Master and Margarita.
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Margarita's magical flight across Moscow on a broomstick is the novel's most visually surreal sequence, depicting her naked ride through the city as a pivotal moment of supernatural liberation.
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Bulgakov's manuscript was smuggled out of Soviet Union by his widow Elena Sergeevna, who preserved it for publication after his death in 1966.
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The novel's Jerusalem chapters depicting Pontius Pilate were inspired by Bulgakov's 1921 reading of Anatole France's The Procurator of Judea.
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Three parallel narratives structure The Master and Margarita: the Moscow storyline of the 1930s, Pontius Pilate's encounter with Yeshua in ancient Jerusalem, and the Master's tragic love story interwoven throughout.
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Bulgakov's 1966 manuscript comprised approximately 160,000 words across multiple drafts he revised extensively throughout the 1930s and 1940s before completing The Master and Margarita.
- 02
Satan's character in The Master and Margarita appears as Woland, a mysterious foreign professor who arrives in 1930s Moscow to disrupt Soviet society with supernatural chaos and dark humor.
- 01
Mikhail Bulgakov completed The Master and Margarita in 1966, the year of his death, though the novel remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1967.