The unpublished writer of the devil
In 1930, with all paths to publication blocked, Bulgakov hurled the first draft of *The Master and Margarita* into the fireplace. Years later in the novel, the devil Woland pulls the burned manuscript from the ashes and says: 'Manuscripts don't burn.' Bulgakov rewrote it until his death — and the line proved true.
A physician turned novelist and playwright, he bent Soviet bureaucracy and fear through fantasy and satire. With his plays banned and publication blocked, he revised *The Master and Margarita* until his death; the novel first appeared posthumously in censored form.
Career Timeline
- 1916–1919Practised medicine
- 1921Moved to Moscow and began literary work
- 1925–1929Published fiction and plays amid censorship
- 1928–1940Wrote *The Master and Margarita*
Related historical events
The 1930 Letter to the Government and Stalin's Phone Call
By spring 1930, Bulgakov was at the end of his rope. His plays Flight, Zoyka's Apartment, and The Crimson Island were all banned, and The Days of the Turbins had been pulled from the repertoire. His works were no longer printed, and he had no means of support. That year's Literary Encyclopedia dismissed him as a writer who "failed to appreciate the collapse of the old or to understand the construction of the new."
On March 28, 1930, Bulgakov wrote to the Soviet government: "I ask the Soviet Government to decide my fate — either grant me the right to emigrate, or give me the opportunity to work at the Moscow Art Theatre." He described himself as "the only bourgeois satirist in Soviet Russia" while insisting that his great theme was "the depiction of the Russian intelligentsia as the finest stratum in our country."
On April 18, 1930, Stalin telephoned Bulgakov personally. He advised the playwright to apply for a position at the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). That single phone call saved Bulgakov's life. He worked as an assistant director at MKhAT from 1930 to 1936, and later as a librettist and translator at the Bolshoi Theatre. But his survival was a twisted one: the ban on publishing his major works was never lifted, and The Master and Margarita remained, until his death, a manuscript in his desk drawer.