About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Mikhail Bulgakov

Encyclopedia : M : MI : MIK : Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov
Enlarge
Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков; May 15 [O.S. May 3] 1891, 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.

Contents

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 Bulgakov, who enlisted as a field doctor, ended up in the Caucasus, where he eventually began working as a journalist. 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.

In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. In 1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University. In 1921, he moved with Tatiana to Moscow. Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Lyubov' Belozerskaya. In 1932, 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.

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 and received a personal phone call from Stalin himself, denying him that. 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. Stalin, consequently, did not so much "favor" Bulgakov, as stated above, as enjoy tormenting him, along with many artists of the Soviet era. The refusal of the authorities to let him work in the theater and his desire to see his family living abroad, whom he had not seen for many years, led him to seek drastic measures. 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 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.

The Master and Margarita

It is the 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 of the Soviet novels, although it is difficult to imagine Joseph Stalin approving it. 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.

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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, 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.

Famous catch-phrases

Bulgakov's flat

Bulgakov's old flat, in which parts of the novel are set, since the 1980s has 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, they have had trouble contacting the flat's anonymous owner.

Bibliography

Bibliography in English

Yury Yakovlev and Savely Kramarov in Leonid Gaidai's adaptation of Bulgakov's play Ivan Vasilievich (1973).
Enlarge
Yury Yakovlev and Savely Kramarov in Leonid Gaidai's adaptation of Bulgakov's play Ivan Vasilievich (1973).

In chronological order of translation

Novels and short stories

Theater

Bibliography in Russian

Bulgakov's tomb at Novodevichy Cemetery incorporates a gravestone taken from Gogol's grave during his reburial in 1931.
Enlarge
Bulgakov's tomb at Novodevichy Cemetery incorporates a gravestone taken from Gogol's grave during his reburial in 1931.

In square brackets the translitteration and the literal translation of the title.

Novels and short stories

Theater

Anthologies, collected works and letters

External links























































 





From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.














Search Titles









0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?










E-mail this article to:



Personal Message: