Like any modern political group, Stalin’s regime was predominantly interested in propagating their own version of truth. “I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn’t need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn’t need water.” He further pointed out that of the 301 references to him in the Soviet press, 298 of them were “hostile and abusive.” He quotes the Komsomol Pravda in particular, “Bulgakov, ONE OF THE NOUVEAU BOURGEOIS BREED, spraying vitriolic but impotent spittle over the working class and its Communist ideals.” Bulgakov himself had typed the clause in all capitals. In a letter to the Soviet government in 1930, Bulgakov described Crimson Island as a call for creative freedom. His play Crimson Island used Jules Verne’s characters to paint the Revolution as a squabble between exploited natives and aristocratic colonials. His play A Cabal of Hypocrites examined the struggles of Moliere to negotiate his artistic ambitions with the orthodoxy of powerful Catholic leaders and the tepid support of his patron King Louis XIV. His novel Heart of a Dog mocked the new Soviet man as a macabre experiment gone terribly wrong. His writing was unapologetically opposed to Bolshevik ambitions. Indeed, he seemed to be somewhat lacking in fear. Boris Pasternak was one of the very few who was spared Stalin himself drew the line through his name, saying, “Don’t touch this cloud dweller.”īulgakov admitted to burning an early draft of The Master, though one suspects this was predominantly motivated by frustration. Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, tried, and executed by firing squad, as was Isaac Babel. Maxim Gorky, a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature, was placed under house arrest, only to disappear a short time later under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps they thought they’d succeeded.Ĭertainly there was reason for writers of that time to be circumspect-Mandelstam was arrested and exiled because of a poem. In a letter to the Soviet government, he wrote, “not being allowed to write is tantamount to being buried alive.” Perhaps the government thought they could silence him. Some of his work was smuggled abroad and gained popularity, but Bulgakov was repeatedly denied permission to emigrate. He received commissions for and wrote plays-and directors like Konstantin Stanislawski and Vsevolod Meyerhold begged to work on them-only to be barred from performance. Yet after his first success, the play The Day of the Turbins, he published or produced little else, and from his letters, his notes, and his wife’s diary, we can witness the heartbreak this silence engendered. It has been cited as the inspiration for The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”Īnd while many focus on Bulgakov’s posthumous triumph, the examination of his entire career raises another pressing question: Faced with constant censorship and artistic oppression, why did he continue to write? Over the span of two decades, he wrote dozens of short stories, four novels, and ten plays. It has been translated into every major world language and rendered in countless film and television and stage productions. Only in 1973 was it published in its entirety. Heavily censored, The Master and Margarita first appeared in serialized form in 19. His widow, who was the inspiration for his Margarita, recognized the inherent danger of his satirical portrayal of Soviet bureaucracy and hid the manuscript until after the death of Stalin. He’d spent his last 12 years working on a novel in secret- The Master and Margarita. But his life as a writer in Moscow from the early 1920s until 1940 was replete with informants and searches, censorship and secrecy, until it ended suddenly and tragically at the age of 49. Before his death at a Siberian transit camp in 1938, Osip Mandelstam famously uttered, “Only in Russia is poetry respected-it gets people killed.” Today, Mikhail Bulgakov is one of the most iconic Russian authors.
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