Within a Sky Full of Earth

A TALK BY PETER SUART
Mikhail Bulgakov started writing The Master and Margarita in 1928. The first version of the novel was destroyed (according to Bulgakov, burned in a stove) in March 1930 when he was notified that his play The Cabal of Hypocrites was banned. The work was restarted in 1931 and in 1935 Bulgakov attended the Spring Festival at Spaso House, a party said to have inspired the masked ball of the novel. The second draft was completed in 1936 by which point all the major plot lines of the final version were in place. The third draft was finished in 1937. Bulgakov continued to polish the work with the aid of his wife, but was forced to stop work on the fourth version four weeks before his death in 1940. The work was completed by his wife during 1940–1941 and she tried endlessly to publish it.
A censored version (12% of the text removed and still more changed) of the book was first published in a Moscow magazine.The text of all the omitted and changed parts, with indications of the places of modification, was published on a samizdat basis. In 1967 the publisher Posev (Frankfurt) printed a version produced with the aid of these inserts. In Russia, the first complete version, prepared by Anna Saakyants, was published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973, based on the version of the beginning of 1940 proofread by the publisher. This version remained the canonical edition until 1989, when the last and complete version was prepared by literature expert Lidiya Yanovskaya based on all available manuscripts.
The Mikhail Bulgakov Museum in Moscow was vandalized on December, 2006, allegedly by a religious fanatic who denounced The Master and Margarita as being satanic propaganda.

In 2007 Peter Suart illustrated the book for The Folio Society in London, and it is from this work that this talk as sprung. Peter will show his illustrations for the book and discuss Bulgakov’s vision of Jesus as a non-divine seer; Faust, Science and the whirlpool of good and evil; The life and work of Bulgakov.
The session will close with a look at the presence of some of these ideas in Peter Suart own series of illustrated books, the Tik and Tok adventures, published by MCCM Creations. That's how we will get the spell that could have change the whole human History if published in its time.
[CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ZOOM IN OR DOWNLOAD THE POSTER HERE]

The Master and Margarita, a Talk by Peter Suart
BLOOM YELLOW • ALBERGUE • ST. LAZARUS CHURCH BOULEVARD • JULY 23 • WEDNESDAY • 18:00