Mikhail Bulgakov
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| Mikhail Bulgakov | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 15 1891 [O.S. May 3] Kiev |
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков; May 15 1891 [O.S. May 3], Kiev – March 10, 1940, Moscow) was a Russian novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita.
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[edit] Biography
Mikhail Bulgakov was born to Russian parents in Kiev, Ukraine, the oldest son of a professor at a theological seminary. The Bulgakov sons enlisted in the White Army, and in post-Civil War Russia, ended up in Paris, save for Mikhail. Mikhail, who enlisted as a field doctor, ended up in the Caucasus, where he eventually began working as a journalist. Despite his relatively favoured status under the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin, Bulgakov was prevented from either emigrating or visiting his brothers in the West.[citation needed] Some details of his biography are unclear as Bulgakov was quite secretive about his past life and swore his wives to secrecy about it.
In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. At the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered with the Red Cross. In 1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University and then served in the White Army. He was briefly forcibly mobilized by the Ukrainian Nationalist Army. In 1919 he decided to leave medicine to pursue his love of literature. 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 none of his works were published due to censorship.
In 1931, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Yelena Shilovskaya, who would prove to be inspiration for the character Margarita from his most famous novel, 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wrote plays, critical works, stories, and made several translations and dramatisations of novels, but these were unpublished.
Bulgakov never supported the regime, and mocked it in many of his works. Therefore, most of them were consigned to his desk drawer for several decades. In 1930 he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate if the Soviet Union could not find use for him as a satirist and received a personal phone call from Stalin himself, denying him that. 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 his autobiography and in many biographies, it is stated that Bulgakov wrote the letter out of desperation and mental anguish, never actually intending to post it. 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 unsuccessful and he was stressed and unhappy. He also worked briefly at the Bolshoi Theatre as a librettist, but left after his works were not produced.
Bulgakov died from an inherited kidney disorder in 1940 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
[edit] Early works
During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he contributed to Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre. They say that Stalin was fond of the play Days of the Turbins (Дни Турбиных) (1926), which was based on Bulgakov's novel The White Guard. His dramatization of Moliere's life in The Cabal of Hypocrites (Кабала святош) is still run by the Moscow Art Theatre. Even after his plays were banned from the theatres, 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 wrote The White Guard (Белая гвардия) (1924, published in 1966) - a novel about a life of a White Army officer's family in Civil war Kiev, and a short story collection entitled Notes of a Young Doctor (Записки юного врача), based on Bulgakov's work as a country doctor in 1916 - 1919. In the mid-1920s, he came to admire the works of H.G. Wells and wrote several stories with sci-fi style elements, notably The Fatal Eggs (Роковые яйца) (1924) and the Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце) (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 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. 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 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.
[edit] The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita is a fantasy satirical novel The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), published by his wife almost thirty years after his death, in 1966, 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. In the opinion of many, The Master and Margarita is the best Russian novel of the twentieth century. It 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.
The novel is a multilayered critique of the Soviet society in general and its literary establishment specifically. It begins with Satan 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 a whole scale indictment of the corruption, greed, narrow-mindedness, and widespread paranoia of Stalinist Russia. Banned but widely read, the novel firmly secured Bulgakov's place among the pantheon of the greatest of Russian writers.
[edit] Famous catch-phrases
- "Manuscripts do not burn" ("Рукописи не горят") — The Master and Margarita
- "There is no such thing as second-grade freshness" — The Master and Margarita
- "I'm just sitting here, not touching anybody, fixing the primus" — The Master and Margarita
[edit] Bulgakov's flat
Bulgakov's old flat, in which parts of The Master and Margarita are set, has since the 1980s become a gathering spot for Bulgakov's fans, as well as Moscow-based Satanist groups, and had various kinds of graffiti scrawled on the walls. The numerous paintings, quips, and drawings were completely whitewashed in 2003. Previously the best drawings were kept as the walls were repainted, so that several layers of different colored paints could be seen around the best drawings. The building's residents, in an attempt to deter loitering, are currently attempting to turn the flat into a museum of Bulgakov's life and works. To date (February, 2005), they have had trouble contacting the flat's anonymous owner. <ref> Stephen, Chris. "Devil-worshippers target famous writer's Moscow flat". The Irish Times, Saturday, February 5th, 2005. Page 9. </ref>
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Bibliography in English
In chronological order of translation
Novels and short stories
- Great Soviet short stories, New Laurel edition, New York: Dell, 1962, 1990. Contains Adventures of Chichikov.
- The Master and Margarita, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, New York: Grove Press, 1967, 1995.
- The Master and Margarita, translated by Michael Glenny, London: Harvill, 1967; with introduction by Simon Franklin, New York: Knopf, 1992; London: Everyman's Library, 1992.
- Black snow: Theatrical Novel, translated by Michael Glenny, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967; London: Collins-Harvill, 1986, 1991, 1996.
- A Country Doctor's Notebook, translated by Michael Glenny, London: Collins-Harvill, 1975, 1990, 1995.
- Diaboliad and Other Stories, edited by Ellendea Proffer and Carl R. Proffer, translated by Carl R. Proffer, 2d ed. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990, 1993.
- The Terrible news: Russian stories from the years following the Revolution, London: Black Spring Press, 1990, 1991. Contains The Red crown.
- Diaboliad, translated by Carl Proffer with an introduction by Julie Curtis, London: Harvill, 1991.
- Notes on the Cuff & Other Stories, translated by Alison Rice, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1991.
- The Fatal Eggs and Other Soviet Satire, 1918-1963, edited and translated by Mirra Ginsburg, London: Quartet, 1993.
- The Master and Margarita, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine O'Connor, annotations and afterword by Ellendea Proffer, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1993, 1995.
- The Master and Margarita, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London: Penguin, 1997.
- The Master and Margarita, London: Picador, 1997.
Theater
- The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea Proffer, Dana Point: Ardis Publishers, 1990, 1995.
- Peace plays: two, selected and introduced by D. Lowe, London: Methuen Drama, 1990. Contains Adam and Eve.
- Zoya's apartment: A tragic farce in three acts, translated by Nicholas Saunders and Frank Dwyer, New York: Samuel French, 1991.
- Zoyka's apartment (revised: adaptation of 1929 and 1935 texts), translated and adapted by Nicholas Saunders and Frank Dwyer, Smith and Kraus, 1996.
- Six plays, translated by William Powell, Michael Glenny and Michael Earley, introduced by Lesley Milne, London: Methuen Drama, 1991, 1994 (includes bibliographical references). Contains The White Guard, Madame Zoyka, Flight, Moliere, Adam and Eve, The Last Days.
[edit] Bibliography in Russian
In square brackets the transliteration and the literal translation of the title.
Novels and short stories
- Записки на манжетах [Zapiski na manzhetakh, "Notes on The Cuffs"], short stories, "Nakanune", Moscow: 1922; "Vozrozhdenie", Moscow: 1923; "Rossija", Moscow: 1923; "Zvezda Vostoka", Taskent: 1973, n. 3. Translated in English with the title Notes on Cuffs.
- Белая гвардия [Belaya Gvardiya, "The White Guard"], novel, "Rossiya", Moscow: 1924-1925 [incomplete]; first complete edition in Izbrannaya proza ["Chosen Prose"], 1966. Translated with the title The White Guard.
- Дьяволиада [D'javoljada], short novel, "Al'manach 'Nedra'", IV, 1924; "Nedra", Moscow: 1926; London: 1970.
- Собачье сердце ["Heart of a Dog"], 1925; edited with introduction and commentary by Avril Pyman, London: Bristol Classical, 1994 (Russian text with English critical apparatus). Translated with the title Heart of a Dog.
- Роковые яйца [Rokovye Yaytsa, "Fatal eggs"], novel, "Al'manach 'Nedra'", VI, 1925; London: 1970. Translated with the title Fatal Eggs. (Spoiler warning: in at least one Hesperus edition of Fatal Eggs the preface writer gives away the ending in the preface.)
- Похождения Чичикова ["Chichikov's adventures"], 1925.
- Записки юного врача [Zapiski Yunogo Vracha, "Notes of a country doctor"], short stories, "Krasnaya Panorama" and "Meditsinsky Rabotnik", Moscow: 1925-1926.
- [Rasskazy], Mosca: 1926.
- Морфий [Morfij, "Morfine"], 1926.
- Жизнь господина де Мольера ["Life of Monsieur de Molière"], 1936.
- Театральный роман ["Theatrical novel"], short novel written between 1936 and 1939, "Novy Mir" 1965. Translated with the title Black Snow, or the Theatrical Novel.
- Мастер и Маргарита [Master i Margarita, "The Master and Margarita"], novel written between 1929 and 1939, first edition partially censored in "Moskva", Moscow, n. 11, 1966 and n. 1, 1967; first complete edition in Russian, Frankfurt: 1969. Translated with the title The Master and Margarita.
Theater
- Зойкина квартира, [Zoikina kvartira, "Zoya's apartment"], 1925. Contemporary satire.
- Дни Турбиных [Dni Turbinykh, "Days of the Turbins"], first representation October 5, 1926. Published Moscow: 1965; Letchworth (UK): 1970. Based on the novel The White Guard, describes one family's survival in Kiev during the Russian Civil War.
- Бег [Beg, "Flight"], 1926-1928. Translated with the title Flight. Satirizing the flight of White emigrants to the West.
- Кабала святош [Kabala svyatosh, "The cabal of the hypocrites"], 1929. Moliere's relations with Louis XIV's court.
- Адам и Ева [Adam i Eva, "Adam and Eve"], 1931.
- Блаженство ["Beatitude"], 1933-1934.
- Иван Васильевич ["Ivan Vasilyevich"], 1934-1935. Ivan the Terrible brought by the Time Machine to a crowded apartment in the 1930s Moscow, screen version: Ivan Vasilievich: back to the future.
- Дон Кихот [Don Kikhot, "Don Quixote"], 1937-1938.
- Пушкин [Puskin, "Pushkin"] or Последние дни [Poslednie Dni, "The last days"], 1940. The last days of the great Russian poet.
- Батум [Batum, "Batumi"]. Translated as Batum. Stalin's early years in Batumi.
- ["L'isola purpurea"]
- ["La corona rossa"]
Anthologies, collected works and letters
- [P'esy, "Comedies"], Moscow: 1962.
- [Dramy i Komedii, "Dramas and comedies"], Moscow: 1965.
- [Izbrannaya proza, "Chosen Prose"], Moscow: 1966.
- [Romany, "Novels"], Moscow: 1974.
- [Pis'ma, "Letters"], Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989.
[edit] External links
- (French) http://www.marguo.com A french website about The Master and Margarita
- (English) Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
- (Dutch) Master i Margarita — amateur but very high-quality site, devoted solely to Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (in Dutch)
- (Russian) Bulgakov.ru — amateur but very high-quality site, devoted solely to Bulgakov and his works (in Russian)
- (English) Mikhail Bulgakov (in German, English and Russian)
- (Russian) Bulgakov Project at km.ru
- (Russian) Klassika Bulgakov - Russian and English texts online.
- Mikhail Bulgakov in the Western World: A Bibliography, Library of Congress, European Reading Room
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