The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov began working on «The Master and Margarita» in 1928 and continued to labor on this work until the end of his life. After the writer’s death in March 1940, a large manuscript of the novel remained with numerous authorial corrections. In his will, Bulgakov appointed his wife Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova as his heir. After 23 years of her efforts, the manuscript of the novel took on a completed form. A few years later, the novel was published in the magazine «Moscow» in No. 11 for 1966 and in No. 1 for 1967 with significant cuts and distortions due to censorship. A total of 159 cuts were made, which amounted to about 12% of the entire text of the novel. 1600 sentences were excluded from the manuscript, while 67 were distorted to the extent that they could no longer fully be considered Bulgakov's. As a result, the novel contained numerous semantic and textual inconsistencies. The text of the novel published in 1973 by the «Art Literature» publishing house also differed in many places from the manuscript prepared by E. S. Bulgakova. The preface made no mention of the complete
uncensored edition of «The Master and Margarita» in Russian, published in
1969 by the «Possev» publishing house in Frankfurt am Main, in which the passages removed by Soviet censorship were set in italics. It is this complete,
uncensored text of the novel that is now published for the first time in Russia.  More than 60 works were created specifically for this edition by the famous Petersburg artist Olga Venediktovna Grablevskaya. Olga graduated from the Faculty of Book Graphics at the Institute named after I. E. Repin. Over 150 books have been published with her design. L. N. Tolstoy, O. Wilde, O. Mandelstam, A. Averchenko, Teffi, Ilf and Petrov — deluxe editions of these and other authors have been released by various publishers, receiving diplomas and awards. In 2013, Olga became the winner of the All-Russian competition «Lermontov 2014», and in 2014, the Pyatigorsk publishing house «SNIEG» released a deluxe two-volume edition of the poet with 150 full-color illustrations. Grablevskaya's repeated references to the works of the classics of domestic humor are not accidental. The illustrations for the works of Chekhov, Averchenko, and the novels «The Twelve Chairs» and «The Golden Calf» by Ilf and Petrov confirm the artist's extraordinary sense of humor. In 2001, she became a laureate of the International Caricaturists Competition in Turkey. For many years Olga has collaborated with the children’s magazine «Kostyor». The light, expressive easel and book graphics of Grablevskaya have been exhibited in many collective and solo exhibitions in Russia and abroad.