The Thinking Reed

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‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’ These words from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita were destined to prove prophetic. For several generations of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia they became a kind of formula for hope: what has been written will return to us, thought cannot be killed.

The history of our culture provides some wonderful examples to confirm the truth of what Bulgakov wrote. Vasily Grossman’s outstanding novel Life and Fate was seized from its author as far back as in Khrushchev’s time. It was supposed that all copies of the manuscript had been confiscated, and the chief state ideologist of those days could tell the writer, with absolute conviction, that this work would not be published for the next two hundred years.

Grossman indeed did not live to see the publication of his novel. Nevertheless, even in Suslov’s lifetime, at the beginning of the 1980s, a copy of Grossman’s manuscript which had secretly been saved from destruction was in the hands of foreign publishers, and in the summer of 1987 the Moscow periodical Oktyabr' announced its intention to publish the novel in its pages. ‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’

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