Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov was a Soviet Russian novelist and playwright whose work, long suppressed by Stalin's regime, became one of the great literary statements against totalitarianism. The Master and Margarita—published posthumously in censored form in 1966—is a satirical allegory in which the Devil visits Soviet Moscow, exposing the corruption beneath ideological certainty and raising profound questions about truth, power, and artistic integrity.

Bulgakov's fiction engages deep questions about the nature of evil, the conflict between truth and power, and the persistence of spiritual life under materialist regimes. Writing in secret, fearing arrest, he completed The Master and Margarita knowing it might never be published. His fate embodied the questions his work addressed: what does a creative spirit owe to truth when truth is forbidden? His work stands as a philosophical defence of the irreducibility of the human spirit.