![]() ![]() Naturally, the novel caused controversy and mass bewilderment when Bulgakov’s fellow citizens were able to get their hands on publicly available copies that hadn’t been filtered by the censors or lost in translation. The Italian publisher Einaudi brought it out in Russian later that same year, but in the Soviet Union, it wouldn’t be published properly until 1973, three years after Elena’s death, though she would have enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that rebellious Russian readers were enjoying copies of the book being secretly passed around under the government’s radar. ![]() Published in Estonian, not Russian, it, unfortunately, couldn’t be interpreted as Bulgakov’s own voice. The publisher Eesti Raamat in Estonia can take credit for bringing out the first unedited rendition in 1967, but it should be noted that this was only a translation. For the book to be published in its full, unabbreviated glory, it had to be smuggled abroad. ![]() Gone was Margarita’s sexual liberty, for instance, and Bulgakov’s mockery of the USSR’s corruption and incompetence as a communist nation. The journal Moskva made the daring decision to finally publish The Master and Margarita in 1966, but this version was censored to the point of butchery, and many of Bulgakov’s canny messages vanished in the process. What Elena did do, however, was preserve and protect the manuscript as a surviving brainchild of her husband-author’s legacy, and in 1963 she painstakingly edited and retyped a new version of it, an act of devotion and perseverance that ranks her among history’s great spouses of genius.ĭuring the years between its completion and its publication, the existence of The Master and Margarita became something of an open secret among Russian literary circles. Even a direct letter to Stalin, who’d admired Bulgakov’s writing talents, accomplished little toward moving matters along. The state is never at any point in the book positioned as the higher power-a major threat to the supremacist government agenda-and so Elena found herself unable to fulfill her vow to publish the book in a timely manner. What The Master and Margarita dares to present is a 1930s Moscow subjected to both paranormal mischief and an overarching Christian-biblical presence, helpless to stop or ignore either. One of the Soviet Union’s main principles was staunch secularity citizens were expected to be loyal to their communist superpower country first and their faith second, if they believed in the institution of religion at all. What made the novel so unacceptable to Soviet censors was not only its depiction of unregulated female power and sexuality, but its portrayal of a USSR that existed parallel to the celestial realms of the afterlife. But two decades is still a long time for a novel to remain in hiding, like a criminal evading the law. It would take twenty years for the book to be published. 50–100 years will have to pass.”Īs Curtis points out, Popov’s prediction was around thirty years off the mark. “The less people know about the novel the better,” wrote Popov to Elena, “The masterfulness of a genius will always remain masterfulness, but at the moment the novel would be unacceptable. Curtis’s reader’s companion to the novel: She was a human woman, and she was given very human, cautionary advice by Bulgakov’s close friend Pavel Popov, as recorded in J. But unfortunately, unlike the fictitious Margarita, Elena didn’t have access to a sympathetic circle of demons who could offer her the power to reawaken her lover’s lost dream. Bulgakov’s third wife, Elena, who was his inspiration for the avenging character of Margarita, swore at the suffering Bulgakov’s bedside-he passed away on March 10, 1940, at the age of 48-that she would make his magnum opus her life’s mission she would prevail against suppression. Following a morbid and natural cycle of life, its birth began on a deathbed. The initial journey of The Master and Margarita to publication is somewhat cryptic. “The less people know about the novel the better,” wrote Popov to Elena.
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