January 1967

January 1967 is the month in which the second part of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita appeared in the January issue of the monthly magazine Moskva, completing the novel's first publication in the Soviet Union. This event, following the November 1966 publication of the first part, confirmed that the novel was not a one-issue anomaly but a sustained literary phenomenon that would permanently alter the landscape of Soviet letters. The publication of the second part was greeted with the same enthusiasm that had met the first, and the novel's language, a contradiction of everything wooden, official, and imposed, became a joy to speak. Certain sentences from the novel immediately became proverbial, most notably the much-quoted 'Manuscripts don't burn', which seemed to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, and 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. More penetrating than the defiant 'Manuscripts don't burn', the second aphorism - 'Cowardice is the most terrible of vices' - touched the inner experience of generations of Russians, and 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. The sheer unlikeliness of its publication added to the impact: by 1966 the 'thaw' that had followed Stalin's death was over and a new freeze was coming, and in the midst of the monotonously grim atmosphere of the Brezhnev era 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 150,000 copies of the November 1966 issue sold out within hours, and in the weeks that followed, group readings were held, people meeting each other would quote and compare favourite passages, there was talk of little else. The January 1967 issue completed the publication, and the novel's effect was electrifying. The editors of the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages, but 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. It included additions and changes taken from written corrections on other existing typescripts. 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. However, it involves changes that in most cases have little bearing for a translator. The present translation has been made from the text of the original magazine publication, based on Elena Sergeevna's 1965 typescript, with all cuts restored as in the Possev and YMCA-Press editions. It is complete and unabridged.