The year 1929

The year 1929 is the foundational moment for Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, the year in which the novel was first conceived and written. It was a period of extreme political and cultural repression in the Soviet Union, marked by the beginning of forced collectivization, the first five-year plan, and the expansion of the secret police. In literature, the same struggle was waged in miniature, and Bulgakov, though not arrested, found himself increasingly excluded from publishing and theatrical production. It was in this hostile atmosphere that he began work on the first version of the novel, early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928.

The First Version: The Engineer's Hoof

The earliest version of the novel, narrated by a first-person 'chronicler' and entitled The Engineer's Hoof, was written in the first few months of 1929. This initial draft contained no trace of Margarita and only a faint hint of the master in a minor character representing the old intelligentsia. The Pilate story was confined to a single chapter. This version included the essentials of the Moscow satire, which afterwards underwent only minor revisions and rearrangements. It began in much the same way as the definitive version, with a dialogue between a people's poet and an editor (here of an anti-religious magazine, 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. This account forms the second chapter, entitled 'The Gospel of Woland'.

The Impetus and a Failed Publication

What first spurred Bulgakov to write the novel was his outrage at the portrayals of Christ in Soviet anti-religious propaganda, a response 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'. Literary satire was also present from the start. The fifth chapter of the definitive version, entitled 'There were Doings at Griboedov's', already appeared intact in this earliest draft, where it was entitled 'Mania Furibunda'. In May of 1929, Bulgakov sent this chapter to a publisher, who rejected it. This was his only attempt to publish anything from the novel.

Destruction and Resurrection

The second version of the novel, from later in the same year, was a reworking of the first four chapters, filling out certain episodes and adding the death of Judas to the second chapter, which also began to detach itself from Woland and become a more autonomous narrative. According to the author's wife, Elena Sergeevna, Bulgakov partially destroyed these two versions in the spring of 1930 — 'threw them in the fire', in the writer's own words. What survived were two large notebooks with many pages torn out. This was at the height of the attacks on Bulgakov in the press, the moment of his letter to the government. This act of burning, a moment of fear early in his work on the novel, later gave rise to the novel's famous aphorism 'Manuscripts don't burn', which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, and the free word over terror and oppression. The publication of The Master and Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion, yet the fact remains that Bulgakov did burn what he had written, and it refused to stay burned.