1940

1940 is the year Mikhail Bulgakov died, at the age of forty-nine, a few weeks after dictating his last revisions to his wife. For him, there was never any question of publishing The Master and Margarita; the mere existence of the manuscript, had it come to the knowledge of Stalin's police, would almost certainly have led to his permanent disappearance. Yet he clearly believed a time would come when it could be published. Twenty-six years had to pass before events bore out that belief and the novel finally appeared in print, the effect electrifying. The year 1940 also marks the end of the Soviet monthly magazine The Godless, which had been published from 1922 to 1940; it was precisely the portrayals of Christ in such anti-religious propaganda that first spurred Bulgakov to write the novel. Thus 1940 closes both the author's life and the era of the most aggressive state atheism that his work implicitly challenged.

The Author's Death and the Novel's Survival

Bulgakov's last revisions were dictated to his wife a few weeks before his death in 1940. The novel was left in a slightly unfinished state, containing certain inconsistencies — two versions of the departure of the master and Margarita, two versions of Yeshua's entry into Yershalaim, two names for Yeshua's native town. His final revisions, undertaken in October 1939, broke off near the start of Book Two. Shortly after his death, Elena Sergeevna made a new typescript of the novel. The year 1940 thus marks the moment when the manuscript passed from the author's hands into those of his widow, who would become its guardian for the next quarter-century. The novel's own internal chronology also touches on this year: the epilogue shows Ivan Homeless, now a historian who knows everything, each year with the coming of the spring full moon returning to the parable which for this world looks like folly — a cyclical return that echoes the novel's own long wait for publication.

The End of The Godless and the Novel's Origins

The magazine The Godless, a monthly of atheism published from 1922 to 1940, was the direct stimulus for Bulgakov's novel. What first spurred him to write was his outrage at the portrayals of Christ in Soviet anti-religious propaganda. His response was based on a simple reversal — a vivid circumstantial narrative of what was thought to be a myth invented by the ruling class, and a breaking down of the self-evident reality of Moscow life by the intrusion of the stranger. The earliest version of the novel, written in the first few months of 1929, began with a dialogue between a people's poet and an editor of The Godless on the correct portrayal of Christ as an exploiter of the proletariat. A stranger (Woland) appears and, surprised at their unbelief, astounds them with an eyewitness account of Christ's crucifixion. The year 1940 thus closes the historical window of the magazine that provoked the novel's conception, even as the novel itself remained unpublished.

The Threshold of Publication

The year 1940 is the pivot between creation and reception. After Bulgakov's death, the manuscript survived through the darkest decades of the century. In 1965, Elena Sergeevna prepared a typescript for publication, which was published by Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967. The 150,000 copies sold out within hours. The effect was electrifying. Certain sentences from the novel immediately became proverbial. The very language of the novel was a contradiction of everything wooden, official, imposed. The year 1940, then, is the silent year of the novel's completion and the author's death, the year that separates the act of writing from the act of reading, the terror of creation from the freedom of reception. It is the year the manuscript entered its long hibernation, waiting for the thaw that would finally bring it to light.