He completed his second draft in 1936, by which point he had devised the major plot lines of the final version. He is believed to have drawn from this to create the Walpurgis Night ball of the novel. In the early 1920s, Bulgakov had visited an editorial meeting of an atheist journal. He started writing the novel in 1928, but burned the first manuscript in 1930 (just as his character The Master did) as he could not see a future as a writer in the Soviet Union at a time of widespread political repression. Mikhail Bulgakov was a playwright and author.
A censored version was published in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967, after the writer's death.
The Master and Margarita ( Russian: Мастер и Маргарита) is a novel by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 19 during Stalin's regime.