Wednesday 29 September 2010

“Manuscripts don’t burn” - Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”

Mikhail Bulgakov

I must have first read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in 1971, four years after the first English translation – by Mirra Ginsburg - had been published in the West. I was helping an old friend decorate a largish house in Worthing during the summer vacation. He’d been given the job by an Englishwoman married to a Russian defector called Boris.