The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov - Hardcover

Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891, the son of a professor of theology. Medicine, religion, and education were the dominant careers in his family. Politically, the family appears to have belonged to the liberal monarchist camp. Despite an early interest in literature and the theater, Bulgakov chose to become a doctor. In 1914, as a medical student, he volunteered with the Red Cross during World War I. After graduating from the University of Kiev in 1916, he served in the White Army during the Civil War, and was subsequently drafted by the Ukrainian Nationalist Army. These experiences during the chaos of the Civil War in Kiev and the Caucasus would have a profound effect on the writer and his work. His two younger brothers disappeared during the fighting around Kiev, and later surfaced in Europe. In 1919, while in the Caucasus, he made the decision to leave medicine for literature; soon after he almost emigrated, but was prevented from doing so by illness. By 1921 he was in Moscow where his literary career began in earnest. The Diaboliad collection, published in 1925, was his major publication of this time, since his masterpiece, Heart of a Dog, could not get past the censorship. This same period saw the partial publication of his novel about Kiev during the Civil War, White Guard. Publication ceased when the journal serializing the novel was shut down; however, enough had come out to arouse the interest of the Moscow Art Theater, which commissioned a play based on White Guard. This play, Days of the Turbins, was the source of Bulgakov's fame for the rest of his life, and was a major sensation both due to its vivid characterizations and its portrayal of a monarchist family in a sympathetic light rather than as monsters, which was the norm at this time. By the late twenties, when he had a number of other plays in production (Zoya's Apartment, Flight and The Crimson Island), Bulgakov had drawn down the wrath of the critics who felt that everything he wrote was essentially anti-Soviet. This was a period of extreme polarization, and Bulgakov's career was destroyed by 1929. He would have one more original play, Moliere, staged in his lifetime (but it was quickly withdrawn from production due to the critics), but all publication of his prose ceased after 1927. In 1930 he wrote his famous letter to Stalin, defending his right to be a satirist, and asking that his country let him emigrate if it could not find any use for his talents. Stalin, who had actually seen Days of the Turbins many times, answered this letter with a phone call, and soon afterward Bulgakov had employment with a small theater. The Moscow Art Theater then found work for him, but most of the projects he worked on came to nothing, and the last eight years of his life were full of stress and disappointment. He broke with Stanislavsky and the Art Theater after the Moliere debacle, and began to write Theatrical Novel as a way of venting his spleen. From 1928 on, Bulgakov had worked only sporadically on his major work, The Master and Margarita; in 1937 he dropped Theatrical Novel, which would remain unfinished, and concentrated on the novel about the devil in Moscow. When he died of sclerosis of the kidneys (which had killed his father at the same age) in 1940, he had finished The Master and Margarita, but had not completed final editing corrections. This novel, which would be considered one of the best Russian novels of the twentieth century, was not published until 1966-67 (and then in censored form), twenty-six years after Bulgakov's death. Heart of a Dog, however, was not published until 1987, the height of glasnost under Gorbachev--more than sixty years after it was written--a true indication of just how threatening satire could be to a totalitarian regime.

Text: English, Russian (translation)