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Mikhail Bulgakov
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Mikhail Bulgakov
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков, May
15 [O.S. May 3] 1891, Kiev – March 10, 1940, Moscow) was a Russian
novelist and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He
is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times
has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
Biography
Mikhail Bulgakov was born to Russian parents on May 15, 1891 in
Kiev, Ukraine (which at the time was part of the Russian Empire). He was
the oldest son of Afanasiy Bulgakov, an assistant professor at the Kiev
Theological Academy. He was the grandson of priests on both sides of the
family. From 1901 to 1904, Mikhail attended the First Kiev Gymnasium,
where he developed an interest in Russian and European literature,
theatre, opera.
In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. At the outbreak of the First
World War he volunteered with the Red Cross as a medical doctor. In
1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University and then
served in the White Army. He briefly served in the Ukrainian People's
Army. His brothers also served in the White Army. After the Civil War
and rise of the Soviets, they emigrated to exile in Paris. Mikhail, who
had enlisted in the White Army as a field doctor, ended up in the
Caucasus. There he began to work as a journalist. Bulgakov couldn't
follow his brothers because of typhus.
Though his first fiction efforts were made in Kiev, he only decided
to leave medicine to pursue his love of literature in 1919. In 1921, he
moved with Tatiana to Moscow where he began his career as a writer.
Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Lyubov'
Belozerskaya. He published a number of works through the early and mid
1920s, but by 1927 his career began to suffer from criticism that he was
too anti-Soviet. By 1929 his career was ruined, and government
censorship prevented publication of any of his work and staging of any
of his play.
In 1931, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Yelena Shilovskaya, who
would prove to be inspiration for the character Margarita in his most
famous novel. They settled 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, librettos. Many of them were not published,
other ones were "torn to pieces" by critics.
Bulgakov never supported the Soviet regime, and mocked it in many of
his works. Therefore, most of his work stayed in his desk drawer for
several decades. In 1930 he wrote a letter to the Soviet government,
requesting permission to emigrate if the Soviet Union could not find use
for him as a writer. He spoke directly to Stalin on the phone asking to
leave the Soviet Union. Stalin replied that a Soviet writer cannot live
outside of his homeland, implying that if Bulgakov tried to leave, he
would be killed.
Stalin had enjoyed Bulgakov's work, The Days of the Turbins and found
work for him at a small Moscow theatre, and then the Moscow Art Theatre.
In Bulgakov's autobiography, he claimed that he wrote to Stalin out of
desperation and mental anguish, never intending to post the letter.
Bulgakov wrote letters to Stalin during the 1930s again requesting to
emigrate, to which Stalin did not reply.
The refusal of the authorities to let him work in the theatre and his
desire to see his family living abroad, whom he had not seen for many
years, led him to seek drastic measures. Despite his new work, the
projects he worked on at the theatre were often prohibited and he was
stressed and unhappy. He also worked briefly at the Bolshoi Theatre as a
librettist but left when his works were not produced.
Bulgakov died from nephrosclerosis (an inherited kidney disorder) on
March 10, 1940. He was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. His
father had died of the same disease, and from his youth Bulgakov guessed
of his future mortal diagnosis.
Early works
During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he
contributed to Konstantin Stanislavsky's and Nemirovich-Danchenko's
Moscow Art Theatre. Stalin was known to be fond of the play Days of the
Turbins (Дни Турбиных) (1926), which was based on Bulgakov's novel The
White Guard. His dramatization of Molière's life in The Cabal of
Hypocrites (Кабала святош) is still performed by the Moscow Art Theatre.
Even after his plays were banned from the theatres, Bulgakov wrote a
comedy about Ivan the Terrible's visit into 1930s Moscow and a play
about the early years of Stalin (1939), which was prohibited by Stalin
himself.
Bulgakov began writing prose with The White Guard (Белая гвардия) (1924,
partly published in 1925, first full edition 1927—1929, Paris) - a novel
about a life of a White Army officer's family in Civil war Kiev. In the
mid-1920s, he came to admire the works of H. G. Wells and wrote several
stories with elements of science fiction, notably The Fatal Eggs
(Роковые яйца) (1924) and the Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце) (1925). He
intended to compile his stories of the mid-twenties (published mostly in
medical journals) that were based on his work as a country doctor in
1916–1918 into a collection titled Notes of a Young Doctor (Записки
юного врача), but he died before he could publish it
The Fatal Eggs 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 chicken eggs, while
the government-run farm receives the shipment of ostrich, snake and
crocodile eggs 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 and kill most of the workers on the farm.
The propaganda machine then turns on Persikov, distorting his nature in
the same way his "innocent" tampering created the monsters. This tale of
a bungling government earned Bulgakov his label of a
counter-revolutionary.
Heart of a Dog features a professor who implants human testicles and
pituitary gland into a dog named Sharik (means "Little Balloon" or
"Little Ball" - popular Russian nickname for a male dog). The dog then
proceeds to become more and more human as time passes, resulting in all
manner of chaos. The tale can be read as a critical satire of the Soviet
Union; it contains few bold hints to communist leadership (e.g. the name
of donor drunkard of human implants is Chugunkin ("chugun" is a cast
iron) which can be seen as parody on the name of Stalin ("stal'" is
steel). It was turned into a comic opera called The Murder of Comrade
Sharik by William Bergsma in 1973. In 1988 an award-winning movie
version Sobachye Serdtse was produced by Lenfilm, starring Yevgeniy
Yevstigneyev, Roman Kartsev and Vladimir Tolokonnikov.
The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), which Bulgakov began
writing in 1928, is a fantasy satirical novel published by his wife in
1966, twenty-six years after his death, that has led to an international
appreciation of his work. 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. It contributed a number of
sayings to the Russian language, for example, "Manuscripts don't burn"
and "second-grade freshness". 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 of this novel.
The novel is not only a critique of Soviet society and its literary
establishment. This work is appreciated for its philosophical layer and
for its high artistic level thanks to its bright picturesque
descriptions (especially of old Yershalaim), lyrical fragments and
perfect author's style. It is a frame narrative involving two
characteristically related time periods and/or plot lines; the retelling
of the gospels, and describing contemporary Moscow.
The novel begins with Satan's visiting Moscow in the 1920s or 30s,
joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the
existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It then evolves into an
all-embracing indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness,
and widespread paranoia of Soviet Russia. Published more than 25 years
after Bulgakov's death, and more than ten years after Stalin's, the
novel firmly secured Bulgakov's place among the pantheon of great
Russian writers.
There is a story-within-the-story: A short historical fiction
narrative about the interrogation of Yeshua by Pontius Pilate and the
Crucifixion.
Anatoliy Smelyanskiy, a Russian doctor of art, called "The Master and
Margarita" arrival of The Bible from an unexpected side
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Mikhail Bulgakov
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Elena Bulgakova
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The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
1891-1940
In 1966, almost thirty years after the author's death, the
monthly magazine Moskva published the first part of The Master
and Margarita in its November issue.The book had circulated
underground for many years before surfacing into the public
arena. Had it been discovered during Bulgakov's lifetime, there
is little doubt that the author would have "disappeared" like so
many others—despite the dubious honor of being named as Stalin's
favorite playwright for a short period. The Master and Margarita
has survived against the odds and is now recognized as one of
the finest achievements in twentieth-century Russian fiction.
Sentences from the novel have become proverbs in Russian;
"Manuscripts don't burn" and "Cowardice is the most terrible of
vices" are words with a special resonance for the generations
who endured Soviet totalitarianism's worst excesses. Its
influence can be detected further afield—from Latin American
magic realism to Rushdie, Pynchon, and even the Rolling Stones
("Sympathy for the Devil" is said to be inspired by
Bulgakov).The novel is composed of two distinct but
interconnected narratives. One is set in modern Moscow; the
other in ancient Jerusalem. Into these Bulgakov inserts a cast
of strange and other¬worldly characters that includes Woland
(Satan) and his demonic entourage, an unnamed writer known as
"the master," and his adulterous lover, Margarita. Each is a
complex, morally ambiguous figure whose motivations fluctuate as
the tale twists and turns in unexpected directions. The novel
pulsates with mischievous energy and invention. By turns a
searing satire of Soviet life, a religious allegory to rival
Goethe's Faust, and an untamed burlesque fantasy, this is a
novel of laughter and terror, of freedom and bondage—a novel
that blasts open "official truths" with the force of a carnival
out of control.
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The Master and Margarita
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Мастер и Маргарита) is a novel by
Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to
the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to
be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the
foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic
social order.
Bulgakov started writing the novel in 1928. The first version of the
novel was destroyed (according to Bulgakov, burned in a stove) in March
1930 when he was notified that his play The Cabal of Hypocrites (Кабала
святош) was banned.[citation needed] The work was restarted in 1931 and
in 1935 Bulgakov attended the Spring Festival at Spaso House, a party
said to have inspired the ball of the novel. The second draft was
completed in 1936 by which point all the major plot lines of the final
version were in place. The third draft was finished in 1937. Bulgakov
continued to polish the work with the aid of his wife, but was forced to
stop work on the fourth version four weeks before his death in 1940. The
work was completed by his wife during 1940–1941.
A censored version (12% of the text removed and still more changed)
of the book was first published in Moscow magazine (no. 11, 1966 and no.
1, 1967). The text of all the omitted and changed parts, with
indications of the places of modification, was published on a samizdat
basis. In 1967 the publisher Posev (Frankfurt) printed a version
produced with the aid of these inserts.
In Russia, the first complete version, prepared by Anna Saakyants,
was published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973, based on the
version of the beginning of 1940 proofread by the publisher. This
version remained the canonical edition until 1989, when the last version
was prepared by literature expert Lidiya Yanovskaya based on all
available manuscripts.
The Mikhail Bulgakov Museum in Moscow was vandalized on December 22,
2006, allegedly by a religious fanatic who denounced The Master and
Margarita as being satanic propaganda.
The novel alternates among three settings. The first is 1930s Moscow,
which is visited by Satan in the guise of Woland or Voland (Воланд), a
mysterious gentleman "magician" of uncertain origin, who arrives with a
retinue that includes the grotesquely dressed "ex-choirmaster" valet
Koroviev (Fagotto) (Фагот, the name means "bassoon" in Russian and some
other languages), a mischievous, gun-happy, fast-talking black cat
Behemoth (Бегемот, a subversive Puss in Boots, the name referring at
once to the Biblical monster and the Russian word for Hippopotamus), the
fanged hitman Azazello (Азазелло, hinting of Azazel), the pale-faced
Abadonna (Абадонна, a reference to Abaddon) with a death-inflicting
stare, and the witch Hella (Гелла). The havoc wreaked by this group
targets the literary elite, along with its trade union, MASSOLIT (a
Soviet-style abbreviation for "Moscow Society of Literature", but
possibly interpretable as "Literature for the Masses"; one translation
of the book also mentions that this could be a play on words in Russian,
which could be translated into English as something like "LOTTALIT"),
its privileged HQ-restaurant Griboyedov's House, corrupt social-climbers
and their women (wives and mistresses alike) – bureaucrats and
profiteers – and, more generally, skeptical unbelievers in the human
spirit.
The opening sequence of the book presents a direct confrontation
between the unbelieving head of the literary bureaucracy, Berlioz
(Берлиоз), and an urbane foreign gentleman who defends belief and
reveals his prophetic powers (Woland). This is witnessed by a young and
enthusiastically modern poet, Ivan Bezdomniy (Иван Бездомный – the name
means "Homeless"). His futile attempt to chase and capture the "gang"
and warn of their evil and mysterious nature lands Ivan in a lunatic
asylum. Here we are introduced to The Master, an embittered author, the
petty-minded rejection of whose historical novel about Pontius Pilate
and Christ has led him to such despair that he burns his manuscript and
turns his back on the "real" world, including his devoted lover,
Margarita (Маргарита). Major episodes in the first part of the novel
include Satan's magic show at the Variety Theatre, satirizing the
vanity, greed and gullibility of the new rich; and the capture and
occupation of Berlioz's apartment by Woland and his gang.
Part 2 introduces Margarita, the Master's mistress, who refuses to
despair of her lover or his work. She is (invited to the Devil's
midnight ball) then made an offer by Satan (Woland), and accepts it,
becoming a witch with supernatural powers on the night of his Midnight
Ball, or Walpurgis Night, which coincides with the night of Good Friday,
linking all three elements of the book together, since the Master's
novel also deals with this same spring full moon when Christ's fate is
sealed by Pontius Pilate and he is crucified in Jerusalem.
The second setting is the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate, described by
Woland talking to Berlioz and echoed in the pages of the Master's
rejected novel, which concerns Pontius Pilate's meeting with Yeshua
Ha-Nozri (Иешуа га-Ноцри, Jesus the Nazarene), his recognition of an
affinity with and spiritual need for him, and his reluctant but resigned
and passive handing over of him to those who wanted to kill him.
The third setting is the one to which Margarita provides a bridge.
Learning to fly and control her unleashed passions (not without exacting
violent retribution on the literary bureaucrats who condemned her
beloved to despair), and taking her enthusiastic maid Natasha with her,
she enters naked into the world of the night, flies over the deep
forests and rivers of Mother Russia; bathes, and, cleansed, returns to
Moscow as the anointed hostess for Satan's great Spring Ball. Standing
by his side, she welcomes the dark celebrities of human history as they
pour up from the opened maw of Hell.
She survives this ordeal without breaking, and for her pains and her
integrity she is rewarded: Satan offers to grant Margarita her deepest
wish. She chooses to liberate the Master and live in poverty and love
with him. However, neither Woland nor Yeshua thinks this is a kind of
life for good people, and the couple leaves Moscow with the Devil, as
its cupolas and windows burn in the setting sun of Easter Saturday. The
Master and Margarita leave and as a reward for not having lost their
faith they are granted "peace" but are denied "light", i.e. salvation.
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