The Master and Margarita:Drawings by Nadya Rusheva

Nadya Rusheva was a Soviet graphic artist, born in 1952, who tragically died at the age of seventeen from a congenital illness.

No one ever taught her to draw, yet she had been drawing since she was five. In her first year of school, her father read her The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and during the reading, Nadya drew more than thirty illustrations for the story.

In fifth grade, Nadya's first exhibition took place, after which the magazine Yunost published her works, and people began talking about the young artist. Over the next five years, fifteen more of her solo exhibitions were held in Moscow, Leningrad, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and India.

The drawings for The Master and Margarita, created half a century ago, are perhaps the most famous illustrations of the novel. Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, the writer's widow and the main prototype for Margarita, highly praised them:

How free!... How mature!... The poetic understatement: The more you look, the more it draws you in... What an amplitude of feelings!... A 16-year-old girl understood everything perfectly. And not only did she understand, but she also convincingly and magnificently depicted it.