[The Master and Margarita, in] Moskva.

The rare first appearance

The first appearance in print in any format of The Master and Margarita, serialized in two issues of the journal Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967, in the scarce original wrappers.

Although the novel had been completed in 1938, in common with most of Bulgakov's prose it was not published until long after his death in 1940. During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he contributed to Konstantin Stanislavsky's and Nemirovich-Danchenko's Moscow Art Theatre. He published a number of novels and stories through the early and mid-1920s, but by 1927 his career began to suffer from criticism that he was too anti-Soviet. By 1929 his career was ruined: government censorship prevented publication of any of his work or staging of his plays, and Stalin personally forbade him to emigrate.

This first printing of his best known work is a censored version of the text, eliminating much of the anti-Soviet satire, yet it still caused an immediate sensation on publication. The first edition in book form was published by the YMCA Press in Paris in 1967, also with the censored version of the Russian text. The full text was first published in English later in 1967 (there are two different English translations, one of the censored text and one of the full text). The first appearance of the full text in Russian was published in Frankfurt in 1969.