Who wrote The Master and Margarita?

Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote it in secret between 1928 and his death in 1940, and burned the first manuscript in despair before starting again - which is where the novel's most quoted line comes from, that manuscripts do not burn.

It could not be published. A version appeared in a censored magazine serialisation in 1966 and 1967, twenty-six years after he died, with substantial cuts; the missing passages circulated separately in samizdat, typed and retyped by hand, so readers assembled complete copies themselves. The full text appeared in the Soviet Union only in 1973.

The book is the devil arriving in atheist Moscow with a retinue including an enormous talking cat, interleaved with a sober historical retelling of Pontius Pilate's morning. Bulgakov also did something few writers survive: having been unpublishable and unemployable, he wrote directly to Stalin asking to be allowed to emigrate or to be given work, and Stalin telephoned him personally and arranged a job at a theatre. He spent the rest of his life in that position, protected and silenced by the same man.