Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (or Bulhakov, Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков; May 15 (May 3 Old Style), 1891 – March 10, 1940) was a Soviet novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century. Although a native of Kiev, he wrote in Russian. Like his Ukrainian predecessor, Nikolai Gogol, he is a humorist and satirist of the first order. The object of his sharp wit was the Soviet regime and particularly the "homo Sovieticus," or new Soviet man that the regime was seeking to create. Bulgakov gave the lie to this attempt in his novellas, like Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog, and in his greatest work by far, perhaps the greatest novel written in the Soviet period, The Master and Margarita.

Biography

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, the oldest son of a professor at Kiev Theological Academy. In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. In 1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University. The Bulgakov sons enlisted in the White Army during the Civil War. All but Mikhail would up in Paris at the war's conclusion. Mikhail graduated from Kiev Univesity with a degree in medicine, enlisting as a field doctor. He ended up in the Caucasus, where he eventually began working as a journalist. In 1921, he moved with Tatiana to Moscow where he stayed for the rest of his life. Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Lyubov' Belozerskaya. In 1932, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Yelena Shilovskaya, and settled with her at Patriarch's Ponds. During the last decade of his life, Bulgakov continued to work on The Master and Margarita, wrote plays, critical works, stories, and made several translations and dramatisations of novels.

Despite his relatively favored status under the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin, Bulgakov was prevented from either emigrating or visiting his brothers in the West. Bulgakov never supported the regime, and mocked it in many of his works, most of which were consigned to his desk drawer for several decades because they were too politically sensitive to publish. In 1938 he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate and received a personal phone call from Stalin himself denying his request. Bulgakov died from an inherited kidney disorder in 1940 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

Early works

During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he contributed to Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater. They say that Stalin was fond of the play Days of the Turbins (Дни Турбиных), which was based on Bulgakov's phantasmagoric novel The White Guard. His dramatization of Moliere's life in The Cabal of Hypocrites is still run by the Moscow Art Theater. Even after his plays were banned from the theaters, Bulgakov wrote a grotesquely funny comedy about Ivan the Terrible's visit into 1930s Moscow and several plays about the young years of Stalin. This perhaps saved his life in the year of terror 1937, when nearly all writers who did not support the leadership of Stalin were purged.

Bulgakov started writing prose in the early 1920s, when he published autobiographical works, such as The White Guard and a short story collection entitled Notes of a Country Doctor, both based on Bulgakov's experiences in post-revolutionary Ukraine. In the mid-1920s, he came to admire the works of H.G. Wells and wrote several stories with sci-fi elements, notably The Fatal Eggs (1924) and the Heart of a Dog (1925).

The Fatal Eggs, a short story inspired by the works of H.G. Wells, tells of the events of a Professor Persikov, who in experimentation with eggs, discovers a red ray that accelerates growth in living organisms. At the time, an illness passes through the chickens of Moscow, killing most of them and, to remedy the situation, the Soviet government puts the ray into use at a farm. Unfortunately there is a mix up in egg shipments and the Professor ends up with the chicken eggs, while the government-run farm receives a shipment of ostriches, snakes and crocodiles that were meant to go to the Professor. The mistake is not discovered until the eggs produce giant monstrosities that wreak havoc in the suburbs of Moscow, killing most of the workers on the farm. The propaganda machine then turns onto Persikov, distorting his nature in the same way his "innocent" tampering created the monsters. This tale of a bungling government earned Bulgakov the reputation as a counter-revolutionary.

Heart of a Dog, a story obviously based on Frankenstein, features a professor who implants human testicles and pituitary gland into a dog named Sharik. The dog then proceeds to become more and more human as time passes, but his brutish manner results in all manner of chaos. The tale is clearly a critical satire on the Soviet "new man." It was turned into a comic opera called The Murder of Comrade Sharik by William Bergsma in 1973. A hugely popular screen version of the story followed in 1988.

The Master and Margarita

It is the fantasy satirical novel The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), written in the 1930s and published by his wife almost thirty years after his death, in 1967, that has granted him critical immortality. The book was available underground, as samizdat, for many years in the Soviet Union, before the serialization of a censored version in the journal Moskva, and in a more complete version in the West. In the opinion of many, The Master and Margarita is the best of the Soviet novels, although it had to wait until after the thaw to be officially published.

The action of the novel takes place in several different locations and at several different levels. The backdrop is 1930s Stalinist Soviet society. It is a portrayed as a place of graft, corruption and moral cowardice. Its pedestrian banality is shaken when the Devil shows up with an ensemble of petty demons, including a remarkable black cat. These quite literally "diabolical forces" turn the world upside down, exposing the greed and hypocrisy of the good citizens of Moscow's elite in an hysterical fashion. In sharp contrast to that story is the poignant retelling of the story of Yeshua and Pontius Pilate in selections from a novel by the "master." The juxtaposition of that story with the hysterical shenanigans of the Devil and his associates in 1930s Moscow only serves to highlight the satical expose of the contemporary scene depicted. Finally, to this Hoffmanesque fantasmagoria is added a science fiction element, a metaphysical flight from the bleak present and the poignant past into a hopeful future region where a utopian place can be reached.

The novel contributed a number of sayings to the Russian language, for example, "Manuscripts don't burn". A destroyed manuscript of the Master is an important element of the plot, and in fact Bulgakov had to rewrite the novel from memory after he burned the draft manuscript with his own hands.

Famous quotes

• "Manuscripts do not burn" ("Рукописи не горят") — The Master and Margarita
• "Second-grade fresh" — The Master and Margarita

Bibliography

Short stories

• Notes on Cuffs (Записки на манжетах)
• Notes of a Country Doctor (Записки юного врача)
• Fatal Eggs (Роковые яйца)
• Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце)

Plays

• Days of the Turbins (Дни Турбиных) — one family's survival in Kiev during the Russian Civil War
• Flight (play) (Бег) — satirizing the flight of White emigrants to the West
• Ivan Vasilievich (Иван Васильевич) — Ivan the Terrible brought by the Time Machine to a crowded apartment in the 1930s Moscow
• The Cabal of Hypocrites (Кабала святош) — Moliere's relations with Louis XIV's court
• Pushkin (The Last Days) (Пушкин) — the last days of the great Russian poet
• Batum (Батум) — Stalin's early years in Batumi

Novels

• The White Guard (Белая гвардия)
• Life of Monsieur de Molière (Жизнь господина де Мольера)
• Black Snow, or the Theatrical Novel (Театральный роман)
• The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита)

External links

• Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
• Mikhail Bulgakov
• Bulgakov.ru — amateur but very high-quality site, devoted solely to Bulgakov and his works (in Russian)
• Mikhail Bulgakov — three languages site (German, English and Russian)
• Bulgakov Project (in Russian)

Credits

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