The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

A black cat the size of a man boards a Moscow tram and politely offers to pay his fare, and somehow this is among the gentler things the Devil and his retinue do to a city that has officially decided he cannot exist. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote _The Master & Margarita_ in secret across the 1930s, burning one draft and rewriting it from memory, revising until the morning he died, certain no censor would ever let it pass. So the book became its own proof that in Stalin's Moscow, where a careless word could make a man disappear, the truth could still be set down. Two stories twine together. One is a capital turned to glorious chaos by Woland's magic; the other is ancient Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate condemns an innocent he longs to save and learns that cowardice is the one sin that never lets him sleep. When the Master's burned novel is laid whole on the table again, the Devil only shrugs. Manuscripts don't burn.