The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The devil has come to Stalin's Moscow, disguised as a foreign professor named Woland, with a strange retinue and a huge black cat who walks on two legs. Within days the city's apparently rational order, from the official literary establishment to the housing committees, turns into a marvelous chaos.

Beside the satire run two other stories. The Master, a writer whose novel about Pilate was torn apart by critics and who burned it himself, and Margarita, who becomes the hostess of Satan's ball to win him back. Inside the Master's novel lies ancient Jerusalem, and a governor who knows a man is innocent and sends him to his death out of fear.

Bulgakov himself threw an early draft into the stove in 1930, wrote it again and worked on it until his deathbed in 1940. The novel stayed hidden for more than twenty years, and a censored version appeared only in 1966. Today the censors who blocked it are forgotten, and the book is still read.

That history gives Woland's words, spoken as he hands the Master his burned manuscript whole again, a meaning beyond the story. Manuscripts don't burn.

In Iran, the novel became known through Abbas Milani's Persian translation, published by Nashr-e No and since reissued in a revised edition. In English, a widely read translation is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, from Penguin Classics.

Reviews

Raymond De Luca, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2024
De Luca reviews Michael Lockshin's 2024 film of the novel, which became one of the highest-grossing Russian films ever while pro-government commentators in Russia called for a criminal investigation of its director. He reads the book as one of the great antiauthoritarian works of literature and notes how its own story fulfilled its most famous line, since it survived burned drafts, a dying author and decades of silence before appearing in 1966.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/manuscripts-dont-burn/

Emily Zarevich, JSTOR Daily, 2022
Zarevich follows the manuscript's long road to print. A close friend advised Elena Bulgakova to keep it hidden, predicting it would take fifty to a hundred years before it could appear. She guarded it, retyped it in 1963, and saw the magazine version of 1966 cut away much of its satire and its freedom. When the full text reached Soviet readers, many raised on official classics were not ready for its symbols, irony and fantasy.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-symbolic-survival-of-the-master-and-margarita/

Taaghche blog, in Persian
Written for Persian readers, this guide admits that the novel is demanding and that many readers give up in the first half, and it promises that past the midpoint the reading becomes easier. It then maps the book's three stories so the reader can find the way through them.
https://taaghche.com/blog/1402/08/24/%D9%86%D9%82%D8%AF-%DA%A9%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%B4%D8%AF-%D9%88-%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%DA%AF%D8%A7%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%AA%D8%A7/

Where to get it
Persian https://taaghche.com/book/21277/
English https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780143108276