November 1966

November 1966 is the month when Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita first appeared in print, published in the November issue of the monthly magazine Moskva. The effect was electrifying. The 150,000 copies sold out within hours. In the weeks that followed, group readings were held, people meeting each other would quote and compare favourite passages, and there was talk of little else. Certain sentences from the novel immediately became proverbial. The very language of the novel was a contradiction of everything wooden, official, imposed. It was a joy to speak.

Publication Context and Reception

The publication of The Master and Margarita in November 1966 was a stunning anomaly in the literary politics of the Brezhnev era. By 1966 the 'thaw' that had followed Stalin's death was over and a new freeze was coming. The hopes awakened by the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962 had been disappointed. In 1964 came the notorious trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky, and a year later the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both sentenced to terms in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn saw a new Stalinization approaching, made worse by the terrible sense of repetition, stagnation and helplessness. Such was the monotonously grim atmosphere of the Brezhnev era. And in the midst of it there suddenly burst The Master and Margarita, not only an anomaly but an impossibility, a sort of cosmic error, evidence of some hidden but fatal crack in the system of Soviet power. People kept asking, how could they have let it happen?

The Novel's Impact and Significance

Bulgakov was neither unknown nor forgotten at the time of the novel's publication. His plays had begun to be revived in theatres during the late 1950s and were published in 1962. His superb Life of Monsieur de Moliere came out in that same year. His early stories were reprinted. Then, in 1965, came the Theatrical Novel, based on his years of experience with Stanislavsky's renowned Moscow Art Theatre. And finally in 1966 a volume of Selected Prose was published, containing the complete text of Bulgakov's first novel, The White Guard. But, outside a very small group, the existence of The Master and Margarita was completely unsuspected. That certainly accounts for some of the amazement caused by its publication. It was thought that virtually all of Bulgakov had found its way into print. And here was not some minor literary remains but a major novel, the author's crowning work. Then there were the qualities of the novel itself—its formal originality, its devastating satire of Soviet life, and of Soviet literary life in particular, its 'theatrical' rendering of the Great Terror of the thirties, the audacity of its portrayal of Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate, not to mention Satan. But, above all, the novel breathed an air of freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia.

The Second Part and Continuing Enthusiasm

When the second part appeared in the January 1967 issue of Moskva, it was greeted with the same enthusiasm. The magazine, otherwise a rather cautious and quiet publication, carried the novel. The editors of the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages. These cut portions immediately appeared in samizdat (unofficial Soviet 'self-publishing'), were published by Scherz Verlag in Switzerland in 1967, and were then included in the Possev Verlag edition (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969) and the YMCA-Press edition (Paris, 1969). In 1975 a new and now complete edition came out in Russia, the result of a comparison of the already published editions with materials in the Bulgakov archive. The latest Russian edition (1990) has removed the most important of those additions, bringing the text close once again to Elena Sergeevna's 1965 typescript. Given the absence of a definitive authorial text, this process of revision is virtually endless.

The Novel's Enduring Legacy

Two aphorisms detachable from the novel may suggest something of the complex nature of this freedom and how it may have struck the novel's first readers. One is the much-quoted 'Manuscripts don't burn', which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion. The other aphorism - 'Cowardice is the most terrible of vices' - which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel, touched the inner experience of generations of Russians. To portray that experience with such candour required another sort of freedom and a love for something more than 'culture'. Gratitude for such perfect expression of this other, deeper freedom must surely have been part of the enthusiastic response of readers to the novel's first appearance.