Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev on May 15th, 1891. He would move to Moscow in 1921. It was in Moscow that he would begin work on "The Master and Margarita". Bulgakov was first trained as a doctor, which influenced his subsequent works. This is especially evident in "Master and Margarita" when the body is described or when characters receive certain injuries. Only later did Bulgakov became a playwright and author. He started writing "The Master and Margarita" in 1928, but burned the first manuscript in 1930 (just as his character The Master did) as he could not see a future as a writer in the Soviet Union at a time of widespread political repression.[4] He restarted the novel in 1931. In the early 1920s, Bulgakov had visited an editorial meeting of an atheist journal. He is believed to have drawn from this to create the Walpurgis Night ball of the novel.[5] He completed his second draft in 1936, by which point he had devised the major plot lines of the final version. He wrote another four versions. When Bulgakov stopped writing four weeks before his death in 1940, the novel had some unfinished sentences and loose ends. His novel was also written amidst heavy criticism for his other works and plays. During this time, he wrote to Stalin asking to be allowed to leave Russia because he felt the literature critics at the time were proving that Bulgakov's writing did not belong in Russia. This was not approved, which greatly affected the writing of the piece including the descriptions of the Master and his works.
A censored version, with about 12 percent of the text removed and more changed, was first published in Moskva magazine (no. 11, 1966 and no. 1, 1967).[6] A manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to Paris, where the YMCA Press, celebrated for publishing the banned work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published the first book edition in 1967.[7] The text, as published in the magazine Moskva, was swiftly translated into Estonian and printed in 1967 by the company Eesti Raamat. This version included many scenes and themes that had been previously censored, for example, Bulgakov's commentary on Soviet moral and governmental corruption. The Italian publisher Einaudi published the book in Russian in 1967 as well. For decades it remained the only printed edition of the novel in book form in the Soviet Union.[8] The original text of all the omitted and changed parts, with indications of the places of modification, was printed and distributed by hand in the Soviet Union (in the dissident practice known as samizdat). In 1969, the publisher Posev printed a version produced with the aid of these inserts.
The first complete version, prepared by Anna Sahakyants, was published in Russian by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973. This was based on Bulgakov's last 1940 version, as proofread by the publisher. This version remained the canonical edition until 1989. It is unknown how much of this version was influenced by Elena Shilovskaya, Bulgakov's third and final wife, as she had been in possession of the remaining manuscript notes. Due to the high quantity of manuscripts and drafts, it is near impossible to state which, if any, version of the novel is truly canonical. The last version, based on all available manuscripts, was prepared by Lidiya Yanovskaya.
