When Mikhail Bulgakov began writing his subversive novel, The Master and Margarita, in 1928, he knew it would be impossible to publish it in his lifetime. As he was dictating the final revisions to his wife weeks before his death in 1940, Joseph Stalin was still at the helm of the USSR and purges had targeted artists, writers and every dissenter. It was finally published in the 1960s, heavily censored, and the original saw the light of day only after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In the novel, the devil (Bulgakov calls him Woland) comes visiting and asks an unnamed writer, the master, why does Margarita love him so. He replies it’s because she thinks highly of a novel he had written about Pontius Pilate. Woland first reprimands him for choosing such a subject “in this day and age” and asks him for a copy. When the master tells him that he had burnt it at the stove, Woland waves him away, “Manuscripts don’t burn,” and then asks his assistant, Behemoth, the cat, to give him a copy. Woland gives the master his demolished novel back.
As reality mirrors fiction, and in a world where there is a “growing culture of easy-offendedness”, artists and writers are under attack almost everywhere. Some have had to pay with their lives, some are behind bars for espousing the freedom of expression, and many have been forced into exile. In an essay in February 2002, Salman Rushdie wrote that it is important to resist a “cultural closing-in”, because the freedoms of art and the intellect are closely related to the general freedoms of society as a whole. For writers particularly, the task seems to be cut out — they will have to try every means possible against all odds and even violence to increase freedoms and decrease injustice. Rushdie himself is recovering from a vicious stabbing two weeks ago at a literary meet in New York.
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