Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, born in 1891 in Kiev, Ukraine, was the greatest Soviet playwright, novelist and short story writer. He died in 1941 and many of his works were published posthumously. He is justly famous for his humor and penetrating satire. Yes, I said the greatest, and I have read quite a few Soviet-era Russian authors. His incomparable masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (1967) is on my 'desert island book list'. It is a combination of rigid discipline and wild imagination with which Bulgakov was able to situate Jesus' world in Soviet Moscow, but more on this in a moment.
Beginning his adult life as a doctor, he gave up medicine for writing when his first novel The White Guard (1925) was published as a serial (not published in book form during his life). It was a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the motives and behavior of a group of Anti- Bolshevik White Russian officers during the civil war and was met with a storm of criticism for its lack of a communist hero. Reworking it into a play in 1926 entitled Days of the Turbins, it was staged to subsequent acclaim but immediately banned.
Moving on to satirical fantasies implicitly critical of Soviet communist society. Just as obviously, this work was quickly denounced. In the same year he completed Heart of a Dog (1968) which was also suppressed and not released to the public for four decades, twenty-eight years after his death. A scathing comic satire on pseudoscience, my second favorite of his works is still applicable in today's' internet conspiracy theory fueled society. Only Bulgakovs' incredible humor kept Stalin laughing and thus Bulgakov from the gulag, seriously, Stalin was quoted as saying as much.
Because of their realism and humor, his works enjoyed great popularity but their trenchant criticism of Soviet mores was increasingly unacceptable to the authorities. By 1930 he was effectively prohibited from publishing. He pleaded to emigrate and multiple countries were eager to accept him, but Stalin refused. During the following period of literary ostracism which continued until his death in 1940, he created his masterpieces.
The first of these, a play, was a tragedy on the death of Moliere entitled Moliere (1936) which had a one-week run before being banned due to its thinly disguised attack on Stalin and the Communist party. I confess that I found this entertaining and the political messages beautiful in their subtlety but I unfairly compare it to The Master and Margarita as I had read that first, just so, I unfairly compare any Soviet writer to Bulgakov once I'd read Bulgakov. C'est la vie.
The second of his masterpieces is his dazzling Gogolesque fantasy The Master and Margarita (begun in 1928, published in 1966). Witty and ribald, it is simultaneously a penetrating philosophical novel wrestling with the profound and eternal problems of good and evil, juxtaposing two planes of action - one set in contemporary Moscow and the other in Pontius Pilates Judea. The central character is the Devil, disguised as 'Professor Woland', who descends upon officially atheistic Moscow in the 1930's with his purgative pranks that expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the cultural elite. His counterpart is 'The Master', a repressed novelist who goes into a psychiatric ward for seeking to present the story of Jesus. The work oscillates between grotesque and often ribald scenes of trenchant satirical humor and powerful and moving moments of pathos and tragedy. My favorite line which I will tease with by not describing the context, only the speaker, is haunting; "What would the Earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?" asks the Devil.
It was not finally published in the Soviet union until 1966 and then only in heavily censored form. Published in its entirety outside the Soviet Union it quickly became renowned and then adapted for the stage, attempted often but only one legendary playwright was ever thought to have brought it to the stage correctly (his name escapes me but he died since I was in prison and I read his obit in _The Economist_ and that was his epitaph; "the only one to bring The Master and Margarita to the stage to critical acclaim") One of my life's regrets is that I never saw it, but I hope there's a video of the performance somewhere.
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