Mikhail Bulgakov

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 rule of Joseph Stalin, Bulgakov was prevented from either emigrating or visiting his brothers in the West. 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wrote plays, critical works, stories, and made several translations and dramatisations of novels, but these were unpublished.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 Soviet power, 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

Yury Yakovlev and Leonid Kuravlyov in Leonid Gaidai's adaptation of Bulgakov's play Ivan Vasilievich (1973).During his life, Bulgakov was best known for the plays he contributed to Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre. Stalin was known to be fond of the play Days of the Turbins (Дни Турбиных) (1926), which was based on Bulgakov's novel The White Guard. His dramatization of Molière'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 a play about the young years of Stalin (1939), which was also prohibited by Stalin himself.

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 contains few bold hints to communist leadership (e.g. the name of donor drunkard of human implants is Chugunkin ("chugun" is a cast iron) which can be seen as parody on the name of Stalin ("stal'" is steel).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 (Мастер и Маргарита) is a fantasy satirical novel published by his wife twenty-six 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. 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 an all-embracing 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 great Russian writers.


[edit] Bulgakov's flat

Detail, interior Bulgakov's flat 1997. Photo G. McIver
Bulgakov's tomb at Novodevichy Cemetery incorporates a gravestone taken from Gogol's grave during his reburial in 1931.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.[2]

On December 21, 2006, the museum in Bulgakov's flat was damaged by an anti-satanist protester and disgruntled neighbor, Alexander Morozov.[3]

The museum remains open and contains personal belongings, photos, and several exhibitions related to Bulgakov's life and his different works. There is also a small cafe, and different poetic and literary events are often being held in the flat. As an extra bonus a black cat can sometimes be seen walking around inside the museum. The museum's web site is only available in Russian but the entrance is free and its opening hours are 1 p.m. - 11 p.m. The flat is located close to Mayakovskaya metro station on the Sadovaya street, 10 (go through the arch and then turn to the left).


[edit] Bulgakov Museum in Kiev
The Mikhail Bulgakov Museum (Bulgakov House) in Kiev, (in his family home, which was the model for the house of the Turbin family in The White Guard) has been converted to a literary museum with some rooms devoted to the writer, as well as some to his works.


[edit] Famous quotes
The following quotes from The Master and Margarita have become catch phrases in Russia:

"Manuscripts don't burn" ("Рукописи не горят")
"There's only one degree of freshness--the first, and it's the last" ("Свежесть бывает только одна – первая, она же и последняя")
"Not causing trouble, not touching anything, fixing the primus" ("Не шалю, никого не трогаю, починяю примус")

[edit] In popular culture
The Master and Margarita novel is said to have been read by Mick Jagger and influenced his writing of the song "Sympathy for the Devil". [1][2]

[edit] Bibliography
A bibliography of the works of Bulgakov, in both Russian and English translation, can be found at the article Bibliography of Mikhail Bulgakov


[edit] References
^ The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
^ Stephen, Chris. "Devil-worshippers target famous writer's Moscow flat". The Irish Times, Saturday, February 5, 2005. Page 9.
^ http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061225/ennew_afp/afpentertainmentrussia_061225190417

[edit] External links
(English) (French) (Dutch) (Russian) Master and Margarita Amateur but very high-quality site, devoted solely to Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (in Dutch, French, English and Russian)
(French) http://www.marguo.com A French website about The Master and Margarita
(English) Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
(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.
(English) Mikhail Bulgakov in the Western World: A Bibliography, Library of Congress, European Reading Room