Mikhail Bulgakov

Born May 15, 1891

Reactions to Mikhail Bulgakov have changed so radically over the past hundred years, it is sometimes hard to believe that they all pertain to the same man – the revered author of The Master and Margarita we know today.

If official reviews are to be believed, in the 1920s, this doctor-turned-writer was not just on the literary sidelines – he was relegated to a fetid cultural trash heap. Back in the 1970s, Marietta Chudakova, a leading scholar of Bulgakov’s works, published an overview of the writer’s archive that included quotes from reviews of his works in the 1920s. These reviews make the sorts of hateful attacks we see on social media today look civil. And whereas today, when someone spatters you with vitriolic dirt on Facebook, you can at least respond, in the 1920s, Bulgakov, of course, had no way to defend himself against his critics.

He did have some early successes. In 1926, his novel The White Guard was adapted for the stage as Days of the Turbins and performed to a packed house at the prestigious and popular Moscow Art Theater. But by the late 1920s the first Five-Year Plan had arrived and the pressure on writers from the ideological press was intensifying. Bulgakov was banished from the Moscow Art Theater. Like many of the early Soviet “fellow travelers” who were not enthusiastic supporters of the regime but also not vocal opponents, Bulgakov appeared doomed to a meager existence and ultimate obscurity.

In the spring of 1930, Bulgakov – baited, harassed, and unable to work in the theater – wrote to the Soviet government, asking for permission to leave the country, since he was losing all of his sources of income in the Soviet Union. Amazingly, Bulgakov not only got a response – he received a phone call from Stalin himself. The Vozhd refused to let Bulgakov emigrate, but he hinted that the Moscow Art Theater might now be receptive to his plays.

As a result, Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins returned to the Moscow Art Theater in 1932. This rather strange play chronicles the experience of a noble family living in Kiev during the Civil War. Today it is clear that the play lacks the power and artistic merit of the novel, but in the 1930s, a play where all the main characters are sympathetically portrayed “former people” – nobles, tsarist officers – was quite the sensation.

On top of the play’s ideologically risqué subject matter, the performances featured the Moscow Art Theater’s top actors, so there could have been no question that it would be a success. Tickets to see it were the hottest items in Moscow, and the telephones of the theater’s management rang off the hook with pleas to help get them. During performances, audiences sobbed, there were instances of fainting and of ambulances having to take away people utterly overcome. Nothing else could rival the popularity of The Days of the Turbins. And people wondered: How on Earth could a play like that be permitted? How did it get past the censors? Perhaps Stalin took pleasure in stories portraying the crushed lives of his opponents – we do know that he attended the play several times.

One might have thought that Bulgakov’s star was rising, but in fact he began to disappear from the world of literature. The Moscow Art Theater continued to stage The Days of the Turbins right up to the war, but Bulgakov, like many fellow travelers, came to realize that, whereas in the 1920s they had been subjected to insults and humiliation, their existence was at least acknowledged. In the 1930s, however, anyone who failed to extol Stalinism was no longer allowed to write (or, in some cases, even live).

Bulgakov, who at the time was working on Master and Margarita, was no longer published. He made a living adapting Russian classics for the stage. As a writer, he was sinking into oblivion. He managed to avoid arrest, perhaps because Stalin had a strange fondness for him, or maybe just because he died (in 1940) before Stalin got around to sending him to the camps. In any event, he seemed to have been written out of Soviet literary history. Few saw the manuscripts of his work kept by his widow.

In the 1960s, when Bulgakov was allowed back into print, readers were at first given his writing in small, cautious doses: Molière, The White Guard, A Theatrical Novel. But then, 1966 brought a cultural thunderclap: the journal Moskva published Master and Margarita. The fact that the version published had been severely mangled by the censors did little to diminish its impact.

The Taganka Theater’s production of Master and Margarita was not just a hit (pretty much everything Yuri Lyubimov brought to the stage caused a stir), there was a lot of outright craziness around it. One aspect of that craziness had to do with those who managed to get tickets to a performance but had not read the book. They would sit there utterly confounded: what on Earth was happening here? Why did the play keep going back and forth between 1930s Moscow and ancient Judea? Comic situations arose where people who hadn’t read the novel would head to the cloakroom after the second act (which concluded with Yeshua’s crucifixion), convinced that the play was finished and clueless that an Act III still lay ahead.

Bulgakov was transformed into an idol, a cult figure, and his books were read into tatters. Furthermore, for many in the Soviet Union, reading or seeing Master and Margarita represented their first encounter with the story of Christ, not to mention a depiction of the devil. But it was not the dark forces or the seductive powers of evil that really captivated people. They were intrigued by the writer himself, by the story of Bulgakov’s victimization by the Stalinist regime.

A couple of decades later, perestroika liberated those of Bulgakov’s texts that, in the past, had not been able to get past the censors, including The Heart of a Dog. This rather gloomy phantasmagoria was immediately read, printed in numerous editions, produced for the stage, and, gained particular popularity after it came out on the big screen starring the brilliant Yevgeny Yevstigneyev and generating countless catch phrases: “You’re right, I don’t like the proletariat”; “That’s the end of the Kalabukhov house”; “Don’t read Soviet newspapers before lunch”; and even “Abyrvalg” (“Glavryba” or Main Fisheries Directorate spelled backwards — the second word out of the dog’s mouth after he is transformed into a human).

As time went on, perceptions of Bulgakov underwent several interesting evolutions. For one thing, Master and Margarita became part of high school curricula, rendering this elevated and formerly unobtainable and inaccessible work required reading. Film and stage adaptations of both The Master and Margarita and The White Guard proliferated. Bulgakov became a household name and, as one might expect, attracted critics operating from a variety of viewpoints.

Ukrainians express indignation at the disdainful attitude toward the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian nationalism overall held by The White Guard’s main protagonists. Jews suspect Bulgakov of anti-Semitism. Some crazies relish plastering sinister images and appeals to Satan all over the stairwell leading to the apartment that housed Woland and his entourage. Certain Orthodox figures have begun to accuse Bulgakov of extolling the forces of evil. To top it all off, the writer Dmitry Bykov has posited that Bulgakov wrote Master and Margarita with an audience of one in mind – Stalin – and that he was catering to the Vozhd’s primitive tastes.

In short, today there are many different Bulgakovs – wonderful and evil, brilliant and talentless. At least he has avoided sinking into the obscurity for which he once appeared to be destined.