Master and Margarita - Tapa dura

Banned for 27 years and initially published in a heavily censored edition, The Master and Margarita is probably the most important Russian novel of the 20th century. Written as a satire of Stalin's suffocating bureaucracy, the book has inspired Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, The Rolling Stones' song Sympathy for the Devil and the work of many other international artists, writers and musicians. Latest in Metro Media's highly successful Eye Classics series, which previous volumes include Romeo and Juliet and Nevermore.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to write some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. After a lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime, he died impoverished and blind in 1940, shortly after completing his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. None of his major fiction was published during his lifetime.