Publication of The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita is a novel by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, who began writing it in the late 1920s and worked on it until his death in 1940. It begins when the devil, in the guise of a mysterious professor named Woland, arrives in Moscow in the 1930s with a retinue that includes a giant talking cat, and causes havoc among the city's officials and literary establishment. Woven into the satire is the story of Pontius Pilate and Jesus, written by a novelist known only as the Master, and of his lover Margarita. Because of Soviet censorship it was not published until the 1960s, in a cut version, and the full text appeared later. It is now regarded as a masterpiece of Russian literature.

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