Quote by Mikhail Bulgakov: “Manuscripts don't burn.”

Even if a book is physically destroyed — burned, confiscated, banned — the ideas in it survive in the minds of those who read it or in the determination of those who wrote it. Truth and art are more durable than the physical objects that hold them. Power can destroy the page but not what the page contained.

The Master and Margarita was first published in 1966 and 1967 in the Soviet literary magazine Moskva in a censored form. The full text was not published until 1973. Bulgakov wrote the novel under Stalinist censorship and surveillance, unable to publish most of his work during his lifetime. The line is spoken by the Devil, who has preserved a manuscript the Master believed was destroyed.

Russian playwright and novelist whose satirical masterpiece The Master and Margarita was written in secret under Stalin's rule and not published until 1966, twenty-six years after his death. He burned an early draft of the manuscript himself, then rewrote it — the novel became one of the most celebrated works of Russian literature.