Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel - Softcover

To those living in the West, the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov is known as a fiction writer, his reputation resting largely on his greatly-loved novel The Master and Margarita. During his life in the Soviet Union (1891-1940), however, Bulgakov's biggest career successes came as a playwright in the immensely influential Moscow theater. The novel Black Snow, is Bulgakov's lampoon of that entire pre-war Russian drama scene, complete with a fictional version of his nemesis, the great Stanislavsky (of method acting fame). The book is a writer's story about hapless Maxuduv, an unlucky author (not unlike Bulgakov himself) who is torn apart under the insane forces, overcooked egos, and political machinations that rumbled through the world of the theater at that time.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to write some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. After a lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime, he died impoverished and blind in 1940, shortly after completing his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. None of his major fiction was published during his lifetime.