Mikhail Bulgakov
Every so often I get to muse about who might be the most neglected or forgotten artistin the history of western literature. And I am thinking of relatively recenthistory, not Semonides of Amorgos whose entire poetic legacy consists of one line:“a woman with fat ankles is no good” – a legacy that is now, mercifully,expunged from most memories.
My candidate for the honour of most undeservedly forgotten artist is the Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov. And what makes his continuing oblivion even worse is that it is an oblivion planned and executed by the Bolsheviks under Stalin. Since Bulgakov would not write the state approved type of drivel, he was allowed to write but not to be performed; he was silenced. Today students of modern literature know of him as the novelist who wrote The Master and Margarita but know little of him as one of the most popular playwrights of 20th century Russia - who might have been even more popular had his plays not been driven from the stage by the Politburo with the assistance of the Moscow Art Theatre and Konstantin Stanislavsky.
Bulgakov was born in 1891 to a middle-class family in Kiev – his father was an Orthodox priest and a Professor at a theological academy. Although Mikhail was drawn to literature he actually trained as a doctor (yes, just like Chekhov, and Dr Zhivago) and he served during the First World War as a military physician. He began to write down fictionalized versions of some of his experiences during his spell as an Army Doctor for various sides in the Russian Civil War --essentially, he worked for whoever captured him – a bit like the fictional Dr Zhivago. In 1919 he decided to give up medicine for literature and he wrote extensively about the experiences of his family in Kiev as the Russian Civil War swirled around them. Those experiences and stories became the basis for his first major novel, The White Guard.
Obviously with a politically loaded title like that, Bulgakov was in a lot of trouble just trying to get it published in Red Russia. Then he was approached by the Moscow Art Theatre, who needed saving again (just like with Chekhov and The Seagull). This time it was because their repertoire was all pre-revolutionary plays, and Bulgakov was talked into turning the novel into a play called The Days of the Turbins. This play became not only the second saviour of the MAT; it also became one of the longest running plays in Russian theatre: well over 980performances. Stalin, himself, is said to have seen it fifteen times.
Encouraged by his success, Bulgakov began to write a series of plays for Stanislavski and company (as well as for the competition – he did have to make a living) but after the death of Lenin and the winding down of the New Economic Policy, political correctness became much more important than artistic merit. Bulgakov’s plays were banned, or destroyed in rehearsal. For example, his play about Moliere (A Cabal of Hypocrites)got past the censor and went into rehearsal. And it stayed in rehearsal for five years and then it was given to Stanislavski to direct and he used it for acting exercises and then he proposed multiple re-writes. It never opened – after five years. Bulgakov tells a fictionalized version of the story in his short novel Black Snow, which contains a barely concealed Konstantin Stanislavsky who is quite unlike the hero behind The Method, that is imagined in the West.
As a result of these measures and tactics, no one (or very few people) saw Zoyka’s Apartment, The Run, A Cabal of Hypocrites, Ivan Vasilievich, Don Quixote and Last Days (a play about Pushkin). Each of these plays suffers from a, sometimes painful, attempt to disguise its subject matter in order to evade the censors. He also wrote a wonderful biography of Moliere.
In despair, the playwright sent a letter to Stalin himself asking for a way to make a living and if none was available, permission to emigrate; and then, once it was posted, collapsed in shock at the stupidity of what he had done. People were being shot all around him for much less – it wasn’t called The Terror for nothing. A few weeks later he was called to the apartment house telephone and the voice at the other end said: “Hello, this is Josef Stalin.” Josef asked if he really wanted emigrate and he said no, a writer must write in his own country. He was then told that there was a job waiting for himas an assistant director at the Moscow Art Theatre. It was one of the most extraordinary phone calls in history.
In his last years, increasingly frustrated at the suffocation of his dramatic work under Stanislavski he turned to the novel and wrote, in absolute secrecy, The Master and Margarita (as well as Black Snow). He also quit the MAT and worked instead for the Bolshoi. In the end, dying of an inherited kidney disorder he consigned his great novel to the same darkened drawer where he kept his unproduced and unpublished plays. After he died in 1940, the manuscript stayed hidden until it was partially published by his friends (in Russian) after The Great Thaw in1966 and then completely in 1973. It had already been smuggled out of the Soviet Union and translated and published in Paris in 1967, while it had circulated throughout the Russian intelligentsia in samizdat for years. It is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.
But the plays have had little interest shown in them in the west although The Cabal of Hypocrites (a play about Moliere – he saw himself and Stalin as a kind of reflection of Moliere and the Sun King) was mounted at the National Theatre School in Montreal in the 1980’s. As of now, the most important playwright in 20th century Soviet Russia remains nearly silent in the same west that repeatedly performs (without a great deal of understanding) the great Anton Chekhov. The lost Bulgakov is one of Stalin’s little victories.
