Larissa Lockshin

The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940. A censored version, with several chapters cut by editors, was published posthumously in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967 by his widow Elena Bulgakova. The manuscript was not published as a book until 1967, in Paris, France. A samizdat version circulated that included parts cut out by official censors, and these were incorporated in a 1969 version published in Frankfurt. The novel has since been published in several languages and editions. It satirizes Russian bureaucracy and atheism.