‘In the broad field of Russian literature in the USSR I have been the one and only literary wolf. I was advised to dye my fur. An absurd piece of advice. Whether a wolf dyes his fur or has it clipped, he will still look nothing like a poodle.’ Bulgakov in a 1931 letter to Stalin
In 2007, I was visiting Kharkiv, a city in the east of Ukraine. For reasons I won’t go into here, one evening I was dining in a restaurant called Sharikov with a group of middle aged women from Wolverhampton and my guide Valery. The evening was notable for two reasons: Valery’s assertion at one point during the meal that “When you know you are about to be raped, you should lie back and let it happen” (he was referring to Ukraine’s ongoing political problems, at that point dominated by Tymoshenko’s election campaign. The middle aged women from Wolverhampton were shocked). The second reason was the restaurant itself. Sharikov is named after a character in Bulgakov’s 1925 novel The Heart of a Dog. In the story, a stray dog called Sharik is taken off the streets by a professor, operated upon and given the pituitary glands and testicles of a human. Gradually, the dog turns into an uncouth, ‘primitive’ human being. The novel was banned by the censors who, quite rightly, saw in the novel an allegory about the Soviet state’s attempt to become ‘engineers of the soul’, creating a new type of human being.
The restaurant was notable for taking Bulgakov’s novel as its theme. It even had a statue of the doctor and his dog/human subject at the entrance. You don’t get this sort of thing in England, I thought. The evening was notable for Valery’s excitable behaviour, showing off to the ladies, dancing and having a whale of a time.
In many ways, this early novel (along with other sci-fi themed works such as The Fatal Eggs) could be seen as a training ground for Bulgakov. Before this, he had worked on the equally spectacular (but very different in tone) novel The White Guard. This told the story of Kiev’s astonishing history during the revolutionary period and was later turned into a play (The Days of the Turbins) which was one of Stalin’s favourites. The Fatal Eggs and The Heart of a Dog, however, mixed a realistic approach with something far more absurd, bizarre and humorous. In this way, they seem like precursors to Bulgakov’s masterpiece, The Master and Margarita.
Bulgakov wrote the novel with little ambition for publication. He was writing, as it were, ‘for the drawer.’ In many ways, his literary career followed that of any Soviet author who attempted to write from the heart: early acceptance and later denial, poverty and death. It would seem that Bulgakov was saved from arrest because of Stalin’s own affection for him and his early works: in 1930, Bulgakov received a personal phone call from Stalin in which they discussed the writer’s future in the Soviet Union. Stalin gave the author permission to continue working at the Moscow Art Theatre (Bulgakov wrote the novel Black Snow about his experiences there. Confusingly, it’s sometimes translated as A Dead Man’s Memoir or A Theatrical Novel).
The Master and Margarita tells the story of Satan’s appearance in 1930s Moscow. He eventually rescues the manuscript of the novel The Master is writing about Pontius Pilate (the novel itself is presented to the reader in alternate chapters, providing a serious, thoughtful counterpoint to the theme of oppression) which the author has burned in a fit of despair and misery (‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, Satan tells The Master in one of the novel’s most famous lines). Even despite the novel’s unfinished nature and its confusing, ambiguous ending, it’s a masterpiece, offering beguiling scenes of the madness caused by Satan’s appearance as well as the heartbreakingly tender narrative of Margarita’s love for The Master. It’s a difficult job to sum the novel up succinctly . . .
On one of my visits to Moscow, I stayed in a set of rented rooms directly opposite the apartment Bulgakov lived in on Bolshaya Sadovaya. It had been turned into a small museum attempting to honour the writer’s life and works. I say ‘attempting’ because, when I visited, there wasn’t a great deal to see. A weird fancy chicken was strutting around the rooms and a small shop sold, among other things, the Soviet version of saucy British seaside postcards. I’m in two minds about whether this is a fitting tribute to the writer or not.
Later in his life, Bulgakov attempted to compile some of his early stories about his life as a doctor into book form. He was unable to do this during his lifetime but, in more recent years A Country Doctor’s Notebook was published. It’s one of his most endearing works and it was recently turned into a miniseries on Sky Arts starring Jon Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe as the older and younger versions of the doctor. Despite the ludicrous faux-Cyrillic typeface used in the credits, I really enjoyed it.
He died on 10th March 1940. His last moments were later captured in a letter written by Bulgakov’s wife Yelena Sergeyevna to the writer’s brother Nikolay: ‘Misha began to breathe faster and faster, then suddenly opened his eyes very wide and sighed. There was astonishment in his eyes and they were filled with an unusual light. And he died. This was at 16.39, as I noted it down in my diary.’
Bulgakov was an incredibly brave and exciting writer working in dangerous times. His novels and plays span an incredible range of material (I’ve not even mentioned his breathtakingly inventive biography of Molière. I have now). If you’ve not read anything by him yet, what are you waiting for?
