So I found out last night that Bulgakov wrote M&M over a period of ten years and never attempt to publish it during his lifetime (there being a connection between publishing and remaining alive...). My theory bites the dust.
I had friends in several different fields back in the day, none of them comsymp types, who knew something about the world of samizdat in the USSR. I don’t claim to know much about it, just enough to know that it is a fascinating tangle for those with the time and inclination to dive into it. There was an intellectual counterculture, mostly pre-political, that became the refuge of the honest people, and the creative people. Was M&M published abroad before it was published in Russia?
It’s always interesting when the truth tellers are forced underground — as in so many domains in the U.S. today. Appalling but interesting.