Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov is a famous Russian writer, whose life is shrouded in mysterious mysticism and an aura of secrets. Coming from the family of a Kyiv professor, he was born on May 15, 1891, and received his name in honor of the Archangel Michael, the guardian of the city of Kyiv.
The young man began writing from early years, although many biographers claim the opposite, calling 30 years of age the starting point. As the story goes short biography, Bulgakov at a young age loved to read, absorbed the information he received like a sponge and remembered a lot of what he read. Vera, the elder sister, claimed that Misha wrote his first work - “The Adventures of Svetlana” at the age of seven, and at the age of 9 he mastered “The Cathedral Notre Dame of Paris"(V. Hugo). At the Alexander Gymnasium (one of the best in Kyiv), Bulgakov fully demonstrated his talents during his studies: he drew cartoons, wrote poetry, played the piano, sang and was engaged in writing.
So who is he, Bulgakov?
The biography (photo of the writer can be seen below) of Mikhail Afanasyevich further continues with his studies at the Faculty of Medicine of Kyiv University. After his graduation in 1914, Bulgakov worked as a doctor in Saratov, and with the outbreak of the First World War, he worked in front-line hospitals under the supervision of experienced military surgeons. The writer Bulgakov, whose biography is full of impressions from wartime and medical practice, wrote a series of stories “Notes of a Young Doctor,” and a fatal incident that brought him together with a boy suffering from diphtheria completely turned the life of a genius upside down.
While saving the child by sucking out diphtheria films from his throat through a tube, Bulgakov became infected. The administered anti-diphtheria serum caused a severe allergic reaction, manifested by unbearable itching and a terrible rash on the body. An injection of morphine helped relieve the pain, and repeated injections made it possible to cope with allergies, at the same time causing addiction to the “life-saving” drug. The resulting drug addiction destroyed the life path Bulgakov everything, mercilessly taking away his spiritual and physical health, rewarding the writer with panic and severe depression, driving him to frantic madness. Wife Tatyana Nikolaevna, trying to save her husband, instead of morphine injected him with distilled water, which caused severe withdrawal symptoms in the latter.
Gogol: did he come or not?
It was during this period that Bulgakov had a meeting with Gogol, the first of three. During one of the painful attacks, Nikolai Vasilyevich appeared in Bulgakov’s rented apartment, quickly walked into Mikhail Afanasyevich’s apartment, looked at him with a crazy look and threatened him with his finger. From that day on it truly happened miraculous salvation from Bulgakov’s terrible drug addiction, who never understood whether Gogol’s arrival was a dream or reality. The writer later told this story in his work “Morphine”.
Mikhail Bulgakov, whose biography and work were closely intertwined, was successful in his personal life and was married three times. According to the prophecy of a Kyiv gypsy, which the writer laughed at at one time, in his life he will get three wives: one from God, the second from people, the third from the devil. After a miraculous recovery, Mikhail Afanasyevich opened a private practice and during the same period began to engage in writing.
Tatyana Lappa traveled with her husband everywhere, helping him in his medical work and in his incredible recovery from his fatal addiction to drugs. The First World War and the Civil War tossed Bulgakov around the country mercilessly: mobilization by the Petliurites, escape, mobilization by the Denikinites, typhus, cessation of medical practice, poverty, hunger... And she was always there - faithful Tasya.
Bulgakov: short biography and creativity
From 1919 to 1921 the writer lived in Vladikavkaz; It was there that he stopped practicing medicine and began to engage professionally in literary activities, working as a journalist for local newspapers. There, the comedy “Self-Defense” was written for the theater (the production of which was a success), as well as the plays “Clay Grooms” and “Paris Communards”, and the latter was recommended by Glavpolitprosvet for production in Moscow theaters.
Bulgakov managed to get to Moscow only in 1921. At first, he grabbed any job, trying to feed himself and his wife; I worked on writing at night. And he succeeded: Bulgakov began to be published! His stories and feuilletons were on many pages of newspapers and magazines. It is with Moscow that the actions of such works as “Heart of a Dog” and “Fatal Eggs” are connected.
The works of Mikhail Bulgakov
The novel “The White Guard” described the tragedy of the civil war that played out in Kyiv, the writer’s hometown, and the work shows the tragedy of the people as a whole and in the context of the individual Turbin family - people with a high sense of honor and dignity. Bulgakov, creative biography whose life is rich in bright moments that formed the basis of his works, in the novel “The White Guard” he quite similarly described the Kiev house of his youth. People who lived there some time later broke down all the walls, trying in vain to find the treasure described in the work. Based on the novel “The White Guard,” the play “Days of the Turbins” was written, and the performance based on it was a huge success with the audience.
Inspired by success, Mikhail immersed himself more and more in bohemian life, losing his love for the woman who completely dissolved in him. One day he announced to his Tasya that he was leaving. When parting, feeling enormous guilt, Bulgakov only said: “God will punish me for you...”. This is how the 11 years of living with Bulgakov ended in an everyday way for Tasi.
Lyubov Belozerskaya, a bright spot against the gray background of everyday Moscow life, became the writer’s second wife. A native Muscovite, she helped her husband in everything: she delivered manuscripts to editorial offices, helped overcome provincial shyness, and selected materials for his creations. It was with her help that the plays “Cabal of the Saint” and “Running” were created.
Difficult period, rejection
At the end of the 20s, Bulgakov was attacked by literary critics. His works were assessed negatively, they were no longer published, and his plays were removed from the repertoire. In March 1930, exhausted and torn, Bulgakov, who found himself on the brink of poverty, turned to Stalin with a letter about the opportunity to earn money in the theater or leave the USSR. A month later, Stalin personally called the writer, allowing him to work. An assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater, who earned money by translating and writing librettos and periodically acting in performances—that’s what Bulgakov had to content himself with during such a difficult period for himself.
An outlet for him was the opera Faust, which he often went to see. Grand Theatre; This sight had a special effect on him, lifting his spirits. Another trip to my favorite production ended in severe depression. This was connected with the play “Batum” he wrote, in which the central figure was the young Stalin, and the writer recognized himself in the image of Faust, who had sold his soul to the devil.
Is she Margarita?
Elena Shilovskaya is the writer’s third love. A short biography (Bulgakov again in an aura of mysticism) tells that one day, in the chilly autumn of 1927, the writer was walking along the streets of Moscow, and suddenly a short, sharp-nosed man ran into him, painfully similar to a house guest during the period of Bulgakov’s passion for morphine. Gogol (and it was, apparently, him) looked into Mikhail Afanasyevich’s eyes and pointed at one of the nearby houses. It was there that Elena Sergeevna lived.
At one of the parties where they met, she asked Mikhail to tie a ribbon on her sleeve, and thus “tied” him to her. The wife of General Shilovsky, Elena rushed between two men for a long time, until her husband finally agreed to a divorce. It was with the advent of Elena that Bulgakov zealously began to continue writing his famous novel “The Master and Margarita,” begun in 1929. Elena helped him in everything: she ran the house, typed manuscripts, took dictation, understanding that only future generations would be able to read Bulgakov. Bulgakov created his brainchild, a novel about the Master and his secret lover, about Christ and the devil, in conditions of complete lack of money and hopelessness. Elena fell in love with this creation, recognizing herself in Margarita, realizing that this is the most main book in the life of a writer.
Real prototype of the cat Behemoth
By the way, Woland’s famous assistant had a real prototype, which was Mikhail Afanasyevich’s black dog named Behemoth, very smart for an ordinary animal. There was such a case: during the New Year celebration, while the chimes were striking, a dog barked twelve times, although no one taught it this. like this interesting story preserved a short biography.
During this period, Bulgakov was already stricken with a fatal disease, so he dictated some of the chapters from the novel to his wife Elena. A month before his death, he finished work on his most famous work, which is read by many. It was after the release of this novel that it was said that Bulgakov’s abilities were otherworldly in nature, otherwise how could he so accurately describe the devil himself and his retinue?
The heroes of Bulgakov's works are characterized by charm that makes you fall in love with yourself and feel the special charm of an undisclosed thought. His short biography, in which Bulgakov is a key figure, arouses great interest in the personality of the writer. His works are constantly being filmed, and his literary works are hotly debated. The work “The Master and Margarita” does not leave anyone indifferent, forcing them to treat themselves either badly or well.
1940 - the end of the writer's journey
Nervous exhaustion gave rise to hypertensive nephrosclerosis, which confined Bulgakov to bed. Elena was unable to rescue him from the clutches of his illness; in March 1940, the writer passed away, and he predicted his departure long before his illness. In the history of his life there is the following fact: on Gogol’s grave in the Monastery Cemetery there was a stone, nicknamed because of its resemblance to Mount Golgotha in Jerusalem. When Gogol was reburied in another place, a bust was installed on his grave, and the stone was subsequently installed on Bulgakov’s grave by his wife. And here I remember the writer’s phrase, which he addressed to Gogol in a dream, when he came to him for the third time: “Teacher, cover me with your overcoat.”
Bulgakov's biography, the life and work of the great writer constantly arouse reader interest, which only intensifies over time, fueled by a craving for mysticism and the unknown.
In August 1919, after the capture of Kyiv by General Denikin, Mikhail Bulgakov was mobilized as a military doctor in the White Army and sent to North Caucasus. Here his first publication appeared - a newspaper article entitled "Future Prospects."
Soon he parted with the medical profession and devoted himself entirely to literary work. In 1919-1921, while working in the Vladikavkaz arts department, Bulgakov composed five plays, three of which were staged at the local theater. Their texts have not survived, with the exception of one - “Sons of the Mullah”.
In 1921 he moved to Moscow. Served as secretary of the Main Political and Educational Committee under the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR.
In 1921-1926, Bulgakov collaborated with the Moscow editorial office of the Berlin newspaper "Nakanune", publishing essays about the life of Moscow, with the newspapers "Gudok" and "Rabochiy", magazines " Medical worker", "Russia" and "Renaissance".
In the literary supplement to the newspaper "Nakanune" were published "Notes on Cuffs" (1922-1923), as well as the writer's stories "The Adventures of Chichikov", "The Red Crown", "The Cup of Life" (all - 1922). In 1925-1927, stories from the series “Notes of a Young Doctor” were published in the magazines “Medical Worker” and “Red Panorama”.
The general theme of Bulgakov's works is determined by the author's attitude towards Soviet power- the writer did not consider himself its enemy, but assessed reality very critically, believing that with his satirical denunciations he was benefiting the country and the people. Early examples include the stories "The Diaboliad. The Tale of How Twins Killed a Clerk" (1924) and "The Fatal Eggs" (1925), collected in the collection "The Diaboliad" (1925). The story “The Heart of a Dog,” written in 1925, is distinguished by greater skill and a sharper social orientation, which was in “samizdat” for more than 60 years.
The boundary separating the early Bulgakov from the mature one was the novel The White Guard (1925). Bulgakov's departure from the emphatically negative image of the White Guard environment brought upon the writer accusations of trying to justify the White movement.
Later, based on the novel and in collaboration with the Moscow Art Theater, Bulgakov wrote the play “Days of the Turbins” (1926). The famous Moscow Art Theater production of this play (the premiere took place on October 5, 1926) brought Bulgakov wide fame. "Days of the Turbins" enjoyed unprecedented success among the audience, but not among critics, who launched a devastating campaign against the play, which was "apologetic" in relation to the white movement, and against the "anti-Soviet" author of the play.
During the same period, Bulgakov’s play “Zoyka’s Apartment” (1926) was staged at the Evgeni Vakhtangov Studio Theater, which was banned after the 200th performance. The play "Running" (1928) was banned after the first rehearsals at the Moscow Art Theater.
The play "Crimson Island" (1927), staged at the Moscow Chamber Theater, was banned after the 50th performance.
At the beginning of 1930, his play "The Cabal of the Saint" (1929) was banned and did not reach rehearsals in the theater.
Bulgakov's plays were removed from the theater repertoire; his works were not published. In this situation, the writer was forced to turn to higher authorities and wrote a “Letter to the Government,” asking either to provide him with work and, therefore, a means of subsistence, or to let him go abroad. The letter was followed by a telephone call from Joseph Stalin to Bulgakov (April 18, 1930). Soon Bulgakov got a job as a director of the Moscow Art Theater and thereby solved the problem of physical survival. In March 1931, he was accepted into the cast of the Moscow Art Theater.
While working at the Moscow Art Theater, he wrote a dramatization of “Dead Souls” based on Nikolai Gogol.
In February 1932, the “Turbin Days” at the Moscow Art Theater were resumed.
In the 1930s, one of the main themes in Bulgakov’s work was the theme of the relationship between the artist and the authorities, which he realized using material from different historical eras: the play “Molière”, the biographical story “The Life of Monsieur de Molière”, the play “ Last days", novel "The Master and Margarita".
In 1936, due to disagreements with the management during the rehearsal preparation of Molière, Bulgakov was forced to break with the Moscow Art Theater and go to work at the Bolshoi Theater of the USSR as a librettist.
In recent years, Bulgakov continued to work actively, creating librettos for the operas “The Black Sea” (1937, composer Sergei Pototsky), “Minin and Pozharsky” (1937, composer Boris Asafiev), “Friendship” (1937-1938, composer Vasily Solovyov-Sedoy; remained unfinished), "Rachel" (1939, composer Isaac Dunaevsky), etc.
An attempt to renew cooperation with the Moscow Art Theater by staging the play "Batum" about the young Stalin (1939), created with the theater's active interest in the 60th anniversary of the leader, ended in failure. The play was banned from production and was interpreted by the political elite as the writer’s desire to improve relations with the authorities.
In 1929-1940, Bulgakov’s multifaceted philosophical and fantastic novel “The Master and Margarita” was created - Bulgakov’s last work.
Doctors discovered that the writer had hypertensive nephrosclerosis, an incurable kidney disease. he was seriously ill, almost blind, and his wife made changes to the manuscript under dictation. February 13, 1940 was the last day of work on the novel.
Mikhail Bulgakov died in Moscow. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
During his lifetime, his plays “Adam and Eve”, “Bliss”, “Ivan Vasilyevich” were not released; the last of them was filmed by director Leonid Gaidai in the comedy “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession” (1973). Also, after the writer’s death, a “Theatrical Novel” was published, which was based on “Notes of a Dead Man.”
Before publication, the philosophical and fantastic novel “The Master and Margarita” was known only to a narrow circle of people close to the author; the uncopied manuscript was miraculously preserved. The novel was first published in abridged form in 1966 in the Moscow magazine. The full text in Bulgakov's latest edition was published in Russian in 1989.
The novel became one of the artistic achievements of Russian and world literature of the 20th century and one of the most popular and books read in the writer’s homeland, it was repeatedly filmed and staged on the theater stage.
In the 1980s, Bulgakov became one of the most published authors in the USSR. His works were included in the Collected Works in five volumes (1989-1990).
On March 26, 2007 in Moscow, in an apartment on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, building 10, where the writer lived in 1921-1924, the government of the capital established the first M.A. Museum in Russia. Bulgakov.
Mikhail Bulgakov was married three times. The writer married his first wife Tatyana Lappa (1892-1982) in 1913. In 1925, he officially married Lyubov Belozerskaya (1895-1987), who had previously been married to journalist Ilya Vasilevsky. In 1932, the writer married Elena Shilovskaya (née Nuremberg, after Neelov’s first husband), the wife of Lieutenant General Yevgeny Shilovsky, whom he met in 1929. From September 1, 1933, Elena Bulgakova (1893-1970) kept a diary, which became one of the important sources of the biography of Mikhail Bulgakov. She preserved the writer’s extensive archive, which she transferred to the State Library of the USSR named after V.I. Lenin (now Russian State Library), as well as the Institute of Russian Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House). Bulgakova managed to achieve the publication of “The Theatrical Novel” and “The Master and Margarita”, the re-release of “The White Guard” in its entirety, and the publication of most of the plays.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources
Attention to the creative heritage of M. Bulgakov is now enormous: his books have been published in millions of copies, 10-volume and 5-volume collected works have appeared, the Gorky Institute of World Literature has announced the preparation of an academic collected works, the writer’s works are being filmed, staged, his plays are being staged in many theaters, dozens of books and thousands of articles are devoted to the work and life of the Master - M. Bulgakov.
Children's and teenage years Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was held in Kyiv. Here he was born on May 15, 1891 in the family of Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, a teacher at the Kyiv Theological Academy, and his wife Varvara Mikhailovna. After him, two more sons and four daughters appeared in the family: Vera (1892), Nadezhda (1893), Varvara (1895), Nikolai (1898), Ivan (1900), Elena (1901).
M. Bulgakov’s classmate, writer Konstantin Paustovsky, recalled: “The Bulgakov family was well known in Kyiv - a huge, extensive, thoroughly intelligent family... Outside the windows of their apartment, the sounds of a piano,... the voices of young people, running, laughing, arguing and singing were constantly heard. ...were a decoration of provincial life."
In 1907, his father, Afanasy Ivanovich, died, but the Academy obtained a pension for the Bulgakov family, and the material basis of life was quite strong.
After graduating from high school in 1909, M. Bulgakov entered the medical faculty of Kyiv University. While studying at the university, in 1913 he married Tatyana Nikolaevna Lappa (daughter of the manager of the Treasury Chamber in Saratov).
He graduated from the university in 1916. After several months of service as a hospital doctor, he was sent to the Nikolsk zemstvo hospital in the Smolensk province, and a year later he was transferred to Vyazma, to the city zemstvo hospital as the head of the infectious diseases and venereology department; According to his superiors, “he has proven himself to be an energetic and tireless worker.”
In February 1918, M. Bulgakov returned to Kyiv, where he opened a private medical practice; here he experienced a number of coups: white, red, German, Petliura. This Kiev year of Bulgakov was later reflected in his novel The White Guard.
In the fall of 1919, he was mobilized by the Volunteer Army, went to the North Caucasus, and became a military doctor in the Terek Cossack Regiment.
In December of the same year, he left service in the hospital, with the arrival of the Bolsheviks he began working as a journalist in local newspapers, head of the literary department (Lito) of the arts department of the Vladikavkaz Revolutionary Committee, gives reports, gives lectures, teaches at the People's Drama Studio of Vladikavkaz, writes several plays and stages them at the local theater.
In 1921, a new period began in the life of M. Bulgakov - Moscow. In September 1921, a journalist, aspiring playwright and writer arrived in Moscow - without money, but with great hopes.
He worked for some time in the Moscow Lito (Literary Department of the Main Political Education of the People's Commissariat of Education) as a secretary, collaborated in various newspapers, and since 1922 he worked in the railway newspaper "Gudok" as a full-time feuilletonist. In total, during the years 1922-1926, he published more than 120 reports, essays and feuilletons in Gudok.
In 1925, M. Bulgakov married Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya.
In 1932 with L.E. Belozerskaya divorced and married Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya.
Bulgakov realized that he was a journalist, a reporter against his will; he grew more confident that his path was different—fine literature.
The writer became famous for his satirical stories in the first half of the 1920s - “The Diaboliad” (1923) and “Fatal Eggs” (1924). The third part of the satirical “trilogy” - the story “The Heart of a Dog” (written in 1925) - was not published during the author’s lifetime. In May 1926, a search was carried out at Bulgakov’s place, as a result of which the manuscript of the story “Heart of a Dog” and a diary were confiscated. In the 1920-30s, “Notes on Cuffs” (1923), the autobiographical cycle “Notes of a Young Doctor” (1925-1926) - about work in the Smolensk Zemstvo Hospital, the biographical story “The Life of Monsieur de Moliere” (1932), were written. "Theatrical novel (Notes of a Dead Man)" (1937), "To a Secret Friend" (published in 1987).
A real great success, fame came with the novel "The White Guard" (1925-1927) and the play "Days of the Turbins" (1926), in the center of which is the fate of the intelligentsia in the Russian revolution. M. Bulgakov’s position as a writer is evidenced by the words from his speech on February 12, 1926 at the debate “Literary Russia”: “It’s time for the Bolsheviks to stop looking at literature from a narrow utilitarian point of view and it is necessary, finally, to give place in their magazines to the real “living word” and “a living writer.” We must give the writer the opportunity to write simply about a “person,” and not about politics.”
M. Bulgakov’s talent was equally subject to both prose and drama (which is not often found in literature): he is the author of a number of works that have become classics of drama: the dramatic pamphlet “Crimson Island” (1927), the plays “Running” (1928) , "Adam and Eve" (1931), "Bliss" ("The Dream of Engineer Rhine") (1934), "The Last Days (Pushkin)" (1935), drama "The Cabal of the Saint (Molière)" (1936), comedy "Ivan Vasilievich" (1936), plays "Batum" (1939). M. Bulgakov also wrote dramatizations of literary works: based on N.V. Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” (1930), based on the novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (1932), based on Cervantes' novel "Don Quixote".
In the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s, M. Bulgakov was known mainly as a playwright, some of his plays were staged in theaters, but most were banned - in 1929, the Main Repertoire Committee removed all of M. Bulgakov's plays from the repertoire. By the end of the 1930s, aspiring writers perceived Bulgakov as a writer already forgotten, lost somewhere in the 1920s, probably dead. The writer himself spoke about such a case.
The difficult situation, the impossibility of living and working in the USSR prompted M. Bulgakov to address a letter to the USSR Government on March 28, 1930 (hereinafter this letter, famous in the history of Soviet literature, is quoted in abbreviation):
"I address the Government of the USSR with the following letter:
1. After all my works were banned, among many citizens to whom I am known as a writer, voices began to be heard giving me the same advice.
To compose a “communist play” (I quote quotes in quotation marks), and in addition, to turn to the Government of the USSR with a letter of repentance, containing a renunciation of my previous views, expressed by me in literary works, and assurances that from now on I will work , as a fellow traveler devoted to the idea of communism.
Goal: to escape persecution, poverty and inevitable death in the finale.
I did not listen to this advice. It is unlikely that I would have been able to appear before the Government of the USSR in a favorable light by writing a deceitful letter, which was an untidy and, moreover, naive political curbet. I didn’t even attempt to compose a communist play, knowing in advance that such a play would not work out.
The desire that has matured in me to stop my writing torment forces me to turn to the Government of the USSR with a truthful letter.
2. Having analyzed my album clippings, I discovered 301 reviews about me in the USSR press over ten years of my literary work. Of these: there were 3 commendable ones, 298 were hostile and abusive.
The last 298 are a mirror image of my writing life.
The hero of my play “Days of the Turbins,” Alexei Turbin, was called in print in poetry “a son of a bitch,” and the author of the play was recommended as “obsessed with dog old age.”<…>
They wrote “about Bulgakov, who was and will remain what he was, a new bourgeois brat, sprinkling poisoned but powerless saliva on the working class and its communist ideals” (“Koms. Pravda”, 14/X-1926).<…>
And I declare that the USSR press is absolutely right.<…>
3. I did not express these thoughts in a whisper in the corner. I enclosed them in a dramatic pamphlet and staged this pamphlet on stage. The Soviet press, standing up for the General Repertoire Committee, wrote that “Crimson Island” was a libel on the revolution. This is frivolous babble. There is no lampoon about the revolution in the play for many reasons, of which, due to lack of space, I will point out one: a lampoon about the revolution, due to its extreme grandeur, is impossible to write. A pamphlet is not a libel, and the General Repertoire Committee is not a revolution.<…>
4. This is one of the features of my creativity, and it alone is absolutely enough for my works not to exist in the USSR. But with the first feature in connection with all the others that appear in my satirical stories: black and mystical colors (I am a mystical writer), which depict the countless deformities of our life, the poison with which my language is saturated, deep skepticism regarding the revolutionary process taking place in my backward country, and contrasting it with the beloved and Great Evolution, and most importantly - the depiction of the terrible features of my people, those features that long before the revolution caused the deepest suffering of my teacher M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin.<…>
5. And, finally, my last features in the ruined plays - “Days of the Turbins”, “Running” and in the novel “The White Guard”: a persistent portrayal of the Russian intelligentsia as the best layer in our country. In particular, the depiction of an intellectual-noble family, by the will of an immutable fate, thrown into the camp of the White Guard during the Civil War, in the traditions of “War and Peace”. Such an image is quite natural for a writer who is closely connected with the intelligentsia.
But this kind of images lead to the fact that their author in the USSR, along with his heroes, receives - despite his great efforts to become dispassionately above the Reds and Whites - a certificate of a White Guard enemy, and having received it, as everyone understands, he can consider himself finished person in the USSR.
6. My literary portrait is finished, and it is there political portrait. I cannot say what depth of crime can be found in it, but I ask one thing: do not look for anything beyond its boundaries. It was executed completely conscientiously.
7. Now I am destroyed.<…>
All my things are hopeless.<…>
8. I ask the Soviet Government to take into account that I am not political figure, but a writer, and that I gave all my production to the Soviet stage.<…>
9. I ask the USSR Government to order me to urgently leave the USSR, accompanied by my wife Lyubov Evgenievna Bulgakova.
10. I appeal to the humanity of the Soviet government and ask me, a writer who cannot be useful in his own country, to be generously released.
11. If what I wrote is unconvincing, and I am doomed to lifelong silence in the USSR, I ask the Soviet Government to give me a job in my specialty and send me to the theater to work as a full-time director.<…>
My name was made so odious that job offers on my part were met with fear, despite the fact that in Moscow a huge number of actors and directors, and with them theater directors, are well aware of my virtuoso knowledge of the stage.<…>
I ask to be appointed as a laboratory assistant-director at the 1st Art Theater - the best school, headed by the masters K. S. Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko.
If I am not appointed director, I am applying for a full-time position as an extra. If being an extra isn’t an option, I’m applying for the position of stagehand.
If this is also impossible, I ask the Soviet Government to deal with me as it sees fit, but to do it somehow, because I, a playwright who wrote 5 plays, known in the USSR and abroad, have, in this moment, - poverty, street and death.
The response was expected with excitement and yet unexpected for the writer - a call from I.V. Stalin on April 18, 1930.
This was an unexpected question. But Mikhail Afanasyevich quickly answered: “I thought a lot about this, and I realized that a Russian writer cannot exist outside his homeland.” Stalin said: “I think so too. Well then, will you go to the theater?” - "Yes, I would like to". - “Which one?” - “To the Artistic. But they don’t accept me there.” Stalin said: “You submit your application again. I think you will be accepted.” Half an hour later, probably, a call came from the Art Theater. Mikhail Afanasyevich was invited to work" 1.
However, M. Bulgakov’s position did not fundamentally change; many of his works continued to remain banned; he died without seeing many of his works published.
Until the last days, work was underway on the main book - the “sunset” novel “The Master and Margarita”. On February 13, 1940, the writer dictated amendments to the text of the novel for the last time.
M. Bulgakov died on March 10, 1940 at 16:39. The urn with the writer’s ashes was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov - Russian writer.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born on May 15 (May 3, old style) 1891, in Kyiv, in the family of Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, a professor at the Department of Western Religions of the Kyiv Theological Academy. The family was large (Mikhail is the eldest son, he had four more sisters and two brothers) and friendly. Later, M. Bulgakov will remember more than once about his “carefree” youth in a beautiful city on the Dnieper steeps, about the comfort of a noisy and warm native nest on Andreevsky Spusk, and the shining prospects for a future free and wonderful life.
The role of family also played an undeniable influence on the future writer: the firm hand of Varvara Mikhailovna’s mother, who was not inclined to doubt what is good and what is evil (idleness, despondency, selfishness), education and hard work of her father (“My love is green lamp and books in my office,” Mikhail Bulgakov would later write, remembering his father staying up late at work). In the family there reigns the unconditional authority of knowledge and contempt for ignorance that is not aware of it.
When Mikhail was 16 years old, his father died of kidney disease. Nevertheless, the future has not yet been canceled; Bulgakov becomes a student at the Faculty of Medicine at Kyiv University. “The medical profession seemed brilliant to me,” he would say later, explaining his choice. Possible arguments in favor of medicine: independence of future activity (private practice), interest in the “human structure,” as well as the opportunity to help him. Next is the first marriage, which was too early for that time. Mikhail, a second-year student, against the wishes of his mother, marries young Tatyana Lappa, who has just graduated from high school.
Young doctor Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov's studies at the university were interrupted ahead of schedule. Was walking World War, in the spring of 1916, “a warrior of the second militia,” Mikhail was released from the university (his diploma was received later) and voluntarily went to work in one of the Kyiv hospitals. Wounded, suffering people became his medical baptism. “Will anyone pay for blood? No. Nobody,” he wrote a few years later on the pages of The White Guard. In the fall of 1916, Doctor Bulgakov received his first appointment - to a small zemstvo hospital in the Smolensk province.
The choice associated with the constant tension of the moral field, against the backdrop of a breakdown in the routine course of life, extreme everyday life, shaped the future writer. It is characterized by a desire for positive, effective knowledge - serious reflection on the atheistic worldview of the “naturalist”, on the one hand, and faith in a higher principle, on the other. One more thing is important: medical practice left no room for deconstructive mindsets. Perhaps this is why Bulgakov was not affected by the modernist trends of the beginning of the century.
The daily surgical practice of a recent student who worked in military field hospitals, then the invaluable experience of a rural doctor, forced to cope alone with numerous and unexpected diseases, saving human lives. The need to make independent decisions, responsibility. Moreover, the rare gift of a brilliant diagnostician. Later, Mikhail Afanasyevich showed himself as a social diagnostician. It is obvious how insightful the writer turned out to be in his disappointing forecast of the development of social processes in the country.
At the turning point
While yesterday's student was growing up, turning into a determined and experienced zemstvo doctor, events began in Russia that would determine its fate for many decades to come. The king's abdication February days, finally - the October Revolution of 1917. “The present is such that I try to live without noticing it... Recently, on a trip to Moscow and Saratov, I had to see everything with my own eyes, and I would not want to see anything more. I saw how gray crowds, whooping and vile swearing, broke windows on trains, I saw people being beaten. I saw destroyed and burnt houses in Moscow... stupid and brutal faces... I saw crowds that besieged the entrances of captured and locked banks, hungry tails at the shops... I saw newspaper sheets where they write, in essence, about one thing: about blood , which flows in the south, and in the west, and in the east, and about prisons. I saw everything with my own eyes, and finally understood what happened” (from a letter from Mikhail Bulgakov on December 31, 1917 to his sister Nadezhda).
In March 1918, Bulgakov returned to Kyiv. Waves of White Guards, Petliurists, Germans, Bolsheviks, nationalists of Hetman Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky, and Bolsheviks again roll through the city. Every government is mobilizing, and doctors are needed by everyone who holds a gun in their hands. Bulgakov was also mobilized. As a military doctor, together with the retreating Volunteer Army, he goes to the North Caucasus. The fact that Bulgakov remained in Russia was only a consequence of a confluence of circumstances, and not a free choice: he lay in typhoid fever when white army and her sympathizers left the country. Later, T.N. Lappa testified that Bulgakov more than once blamed her for not taking him, who was sick, out of Russia.
Upon recovery, Mikhail Bulgakov left medicine and began collaborating with newspapers. One of his first journalistic articles is called “Future Prospects.” The author, who does not hide his commitment to the white idea, prophesies that Russia will lag behind the West for a long time. The first dramatic experiments appeared in Vladikavkaz: the one-act humoresque “Self-Defense”, “Paris Communards”, the drama “The Turbin Brothers” and “Sons of the Mullah”. All of them were performed on the stage of the Vladikavkaz Theater. But the author treated them as steps forced by circumstances. The author will evaluate “Sons of the Mullah” as follows: “they were written by three people: me, the assistant attorney and the hunger. In 1921, at its beginning...” About a more thoughtful piece (“The Turbin Brothers”), he will tell his brother bitterly: “When I was called after the second act, I left with a vague feeling... I looked vaguely at the actors’ made-up faces, at the thundering hall. And I thought: “but this is my dream come true... but how ugly: instead of the Moscow stage, the provincial stage, instead of the drama about Alyosha Turbin, which I cherished, a hastily made, immature thing...”
Bulgakov's move to Moscow
Perhaps the change of profession was dictated by circumstances: a recent military doctor in the White Army lived in a city where Bolshevik power was established. Soon Bulgakov moved to Moscow, where writers flocked from all over the country. Numerous literary circles were created in the capital, private publishing houses were opened, and bookstores operated. In hungry and cold Moscow of 1921, Bulgakov persistently mastered new profession: wrote in Gudok, collaborated with the Berlin editorial office of Nakanune, attended creative circles, made literary acquaintances. He treats forced work in a newspaper as a hateful and meaningless activity. But you also have to earn a living. “... I have lived a triple life,” wrote Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov in the unfinished story “To a Secret Friend” (1929), born as a letter to the writer’s third wife, Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya. In essays published in Nakanune, Bulgakov sneered at official slogans and newspaper cliches. “I am an ordinary man, born to crawl,” the narrator certified himself in the feuilleton “Forty Forties.” And in the essay “Red Stone Moscow” he described the cockade on the band of his uniform cap: “It’s either a hammer and a shovel, or a sickle and rake, at least not a hammer and sickle.”
“On the Eve” published “The Extraordinary Adventures of the Doctor” (1922) and “Notes on the Cuffs” (1922-1923). In The Doctor's Extraordinary Adventures, the descriptions of successive authorities and armies are given by the author with an undisguised sense of hostility. It comes to the seditious thought about the wisdom of desertion. The hero of "Adventures..." does not accept either the white idea or the red idea. From work to work, the courage of the writer, who dared to condemn both warring camps, grew stronger.
Mikhail Bulgakov mastered new material, requiring other forms of display: Moscow in the early 1920s, character traits new way of life, previously unknown types. At the cost of mobilizing mental and physical strength(there was a housing crisis in Moscow, and the writer lived in a room in a communal apartment, which he would later describe in the stories “Moonshine Life,” with dirt, drunken brawls and the impossibility of privacy), Bulgakov published two satirical stories: “Diaboliada” (1924) and “Fatal Eggs” "(1925), wrote "Heart of a Dog" (1925). A story about pain points modern day it takes on fantastic forms.
"Fatal Eggs"
IN Soviet republic a chicken pestilence occurred (“Fatal Eggs”). The government needs to restore the “chicken population”, and it turns to Professor Persikov, who discovered the “red ray”, under the influence of which living creatures not only instantly reach colossal sizes, but also become unusually aggressive in the struggle for existence. Hints about what is happening in Soviet Russia extremely transparent and fearless. The ignorant director of the chicken state farm, Rokk, who mistakenly receives snake and ostrich eggs ordered from abroad for professorial experiments, uses a “red ray” to remove hordes of giant animals from them. The giants are marching on Moscow. The capital is saved only by a happy accident: unprecedented frosts hit it. At the end of the story, brutal crowds destroy the professor's laboratory, and his discovery perishes along with him. The accuracy of the social diagnosis proposed by Bulgakov was appreciated by wary critics, who wrote that from the story it is absolutely clear that “the Bolsheviks are completely unfit for creative peaceful work, although they are capable of well organizing military victories and protecting their iron order.”
"Dog's heart"
The next piece, “Heart of a Dog” (1925), was no longer put into print and was published in Russia only during the years of perestroika, in 1987. Her phrases and formulas immediately entered the oral speech of an intelligent person: “the devastation is not in the closets, but in the heads”, “everyone can occupy seven rooms”, later “sturgeon of the second freshness” and “whatever you don’t miss, nothing at all” will be added to them you are not there,” “it’s easy and pleasant to tell the truth.”
Main character In the story, Professor Preobrazhensky, conducting a medical experiment, transplants the organ of the “proletarian” Chugunkin, who died in a drunken fight, into a stray dog. Unexpectedly for the surgeon, the dog turns into a man, and this man is an exact repetition of the deceased lumpen. If Sharik, as the professor called the dog, is kind, intelligent and grateful to the new owner for the shelter, then the miraculously revived Chugunkin is militantly ignorant, vulgar and arrogant. Having convinced himself of this, the professor carries out the reverse operation, and the good-natured dog appears again in his cozy apartment.
The professor's risky surgical experiment is a hint of "daring" social experiment", taking place in Russia. Bulgakov is not inclined to see the “people” as an ideal being. He is confident that only a difficult and long path of enlightening the masses, the path of evolution, not revolution, can lead to a real improvement in the life of the country.
"White Guard"
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov does not let go of what he experienced during the years Civil War. In 1925, the first part of “The White Guard” appeared in the magazine “Russia”. During these months the writer new novel, and, leaving Tatyana Lappa, he dedicates “The White Guard” to Lyubov Evgenievna Beloselskaya-Belozerskaya, who became his second wife. Bulgakov chooses the path of writing in radically changed conditions, when many are confident that the traditions of the great Russian literature of the 19th century are hopelessly outdated and are no longer interesting to anyone.
Bulgakov writes a defiantly “old-fashioned” thing: “The White Guard” opens with an epigraph from Pushkin’s “ The captain's daughter", she openly continues the traditions of Tolstoy's family novel. In The White Guard, as in War and Peace, family thought is closely connected with the history of Russia. At the center of the novel is a broken family living in Kyiv in the “house of the white general”, on Andreevsky Spusk during the fratricidal war in Ukraine. The main characters of the novel were the doctor Alexei Turbin, his brother Nikolka and sister, the charming red-haired Elena, and their “tender, old” childhood friends. Already in the first phrase that opens “The White Guard”: “Great was the year and terrible year after the Nativity of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the revolution,” Bulgakov introduces two points of reference, two systems of values, as if “looking back” at each other. This allows the writer to more accurately assess the meaning of what is happening, to see modern events through the eyes of an impartial historian.
Back in 1923, on the pages of a diary bearing the eloquent title “Under Heel,” Mikhail Bulgakov wrote: “It cannot be that the voice that is disturbing me now is not prophetic. Can't be. I can’t be anything else, I can be one thing - a writer.” Bulgakov’s powerful entry into literature, about which Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (real name Kirienko-Voloshin) said in a private letter that it “can only be compared with the debuts of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,” will pass by the general reading public. And although the birth of a great Russian writer took place, few people noticed him.
"Days of the Turbins"
Soon the Rossiya magazine closed, and the novel remained unprinted. However, his heroes continued to disturb the writer’s consciousness. Bulgakov begins to compose a play based on The White Guard. This process is wonderfully described on the pages of the later “Notes of a Dead Man” (1936-1937) in the lines about the “magic box” that opens in the evenings in the writer’s imagination.
In the best theaters of those years there was an acute repertoire crisis. In search of new dramaturgy, the Moscow Art Theater turns to prose writers, including Bulgakov. Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins", written in the footsteps of the "White Guard", becomes the "second "Seagull" of the Art Theater, and People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky called it "the first political play of the Soviet theater." The premiere, which took place on October 5, 1926, made Bulgakov famous. Every performance is sold out. The story told by the playwright shocked the audience with its life-like truth of the disastrous events that many of them had recently experienced. In the wake of the resounding success of the play, the magazine “Medical Worker” published a series of stories, which would later be called “Notes of a Young Doctor” (1925-1926). These printed lines turned out to be the last that Bulgakov was destined to see during his lifetime. Another consequence of the Moscow Art Theater premiere was a flood of magazine and newspaper articles that finally noticed Bulgakov the prose writer. But official criticism branded the writer’s work as reactionary, affirming bourgeois values.
The images of white officers that Bulgakov fearlessly brought onto the stage of the best theater in the country, against the backdrop of a new audience, a new way of life, acquired an expanded meaning for the intelligentsia, no matter whether military or civilian. The play included Chekhov's motifs, the Moscow Art Theater's "Turbines" were correlated with "Three Sisters" and fell out of the current context of poster, propaganda drama of the 1920s. The performance, met with hostility by official criticism, was soon filmed, but in 1932 it was restored by the will of Stalin, who personally watched it more than a dozen times (to this day his attitude towards Bulgakov himself remains a mystery).
Drama by Mikhail Bulgakov
From that time until the end of M.A.’s life. Bulgakov no longer abandoned drama. In addition to a dozen plays, the experience of intratheater life will lead to the birth of the unfinished novel “Notes of a Dead Man” (first published in the USSR in 1965 under the title “Theatrical Novel”). The main character, an aspiring writer Maksudov, who works for the Shipping Company newspaper and writes a play based on his own novel, is undisguisedly biographical. The play is written by Maksudov for the Independent Theater, which is led by two legendary personalities - Ivan Vasilyevich and Aristarkh Platonovich. The reference to the Art Theater and two major Russian theater directors of the 20th century, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, is easily recognizable. The novel is full of love and admiration for the people of the theater, but it also satirically describes the complex characters of those who create theatrical magic, and the intra-theater ups and downs of the country's leading theater.
"Zoyka's apartment"
Almost simultaneously with “Days of the Turbins,” Bulgakov wrote the tragic farce “Zoyka’s Apartment” (1926). The plot of the play was very relevant for those years. Enterprising Zoika Peltz is trying to save money to buy foreign visas for herself and her lover by organizing an underground brothel in her own apartment. The play captures the abrupt breakdown of social reality, expressed in a change in linguistic forms. Count Obolyaninov refuses to understand what a “former count” is: “Where did I go? Here I am, standing in front of you.” With demonstrative simplicity, he does not accept not so much “new words” as new values. The brilliant chameleonism of the charming rogue Ametistov, the administrator in Zoya’s “atelier”, forms a striking contrast to the count, who does not know how to adapt to circumstances. In the counterpoint of the two central images, Amethystov and Count Obolyaninov, the deep theme of the play emerges: the theme of historical memory, the impossibility of forgetting the past.
"Crimson Island"
Zoya's Apartment was followed by the anti-censorship dramatic pamphlet The Crimson Island (1927). The play was staged by the Russian director, People's Artist of Russia Alexander Yakovlevich Tairov on the stage of the Chamber Theater, but it did not last long. The plot of "Crimson Island" with the uprising of the natives and the "world revolution" in the finale is nakedly parodic. Bulgakov's pamphlet reproduced typical and characteristic situations: a play about a native uprising is being rehearsed by an opportunistic director, who readily alters the ending to please the all-powerful Savva Lukich (who in the play was made to resemble the famous censor V. Blum).
It would seem that luck was with Bulgakov: it was impossible to get to the “Days of the Turbins” at the Moscow Art Theater, “Zoyka’s Apartment” fed the staff of the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Theater, and only for this reason the censorship was forced to endure it; The foreign press wrote admiringly about the courage of the “Crimson Island”. In the theater season of 1927-1928, Bulgakov was the most fashionable and successful playwright. But the time of Bulgakov the playwright ends just as abruptly as that of the prose writer. Bulgakov's next play, “Running” (1928), never appeared on stage.
If “Zoykina’s Apartment” told about those who remained in Russia, then “Running” spoke about the fates of those who left it. White General Khludov (he had a real prototype - General Ya. A. Slashchov), in the name of a high goal - the salvation of Russia - went to execution in the rear and therefore lost his mind; the dashing General Charnota, who rushes into attack with equal readiness both at the front and at the card table; soft and lyrical, like Pierrot, university private assistant professor Golubkov, saving his beloved woman Seraphim, ex-wife former minister - all of them are outlined by the playwright with psychological depth.
True to the precepts of classical Russian literature of the 19th century, Bulgakov does not caricature his heroes. Despite the fact that the characters were not at all portrayed as ideal people, they evoked sympathy, and among them there were many recent White Guards. None of her characters were eager to return to their homeland to “take part in building socialism in the USSR,” as Stalin advised to end the play. The issue of staging “Running” was considered four times at Politburo meetings. The authorities did not allow the second appearance of white officers on the stage. Since the writer did not listen to the leader’s advice, the play was first staged only in 1957 and not on the capital’s stage, but in Stalingrad.
1929, the year of Stalin’s “great turning point,” broke the fates not only of the peasantry, but also of any “individual peasants” still remaining in the country. At this time, all of Bulgakov's plays were removed from the stage. In desperation, Bulgakov sent a letter to the government on March 28, 1930, which spoke of “deep skepticism regarding the revolutionary process” taking place in backward Russia, and admitted that “he had not even attempted to compose a communist play.” At the end of the letter, filled with genuine civic courage, there was an urgent request: either to be allowed to go abroad, or to be given a job, otherwise “poverty, the street and death.”
His new play was called "The Cabal of the Holy One" (1929). At its center is a collision: the artist and power. The play about Moliere and his unfaithful patron Louis XIV was lived by the writer from the inside. The king, who highly values the art of Molière, nevertheless deprives the patronage of the playwright who dared to ridicule the members of the family in the comedy “Tartuffe.” religious organization"Society of the Holy Gifts". The play (titled “Molière”) was rehearsed at the Moscow Art Theater for six years and at the beginning of 1936 it appeared on the stage, only to be removed from the repertoire after seven performances. Bulgakov never saw any of his plays on the theater stage.
The result of the appeal to the government was the transformation of a free writer into an employee of the Moscow Art Theater (the writer was not released abroad, despite the fact that at the same time another dissident writer Evgeniy Ivanovich Zamyatin was allowed to leave). Bulgakov was accepted into the Moscow Art Theater as an assistant director, assisting in the production of his own adaptation of Gogol’s “Dead Souls.” At night he writes a “novel about the devil” (this is how Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel about “The Master and Margarita” was originally seen). At the same time, an inscription appeared in the margins of the manuscript: “Finish before you die.” The novel was already recognized by the author as the main work of his life.
In 1931, Bulgakov completed the utopia “Adam and Eve,” a play about a future gas war, as a result of which only a handful of people remained alive in the fallen Leningrad: the fanatical communist Adam Krasovsky, whose wife, Eve, goes to the scientist Efrosimov, who managed to create the apparatus , exposure to which saves from death; fiction writer Donut-Nepobeda, creator of the novel “Red Greens”; the charming hooligan Marquisov, devouring books like Gogol's Petrushka. Biblical reminiscences, Efrosimov’s risky assertion that all theories are worth one another, as well as the pacifist motives of the play led to the fact that “Adam and Eve” was also not staged during the writer’s lifetime.
In the mid-1930s, Bulgakov also wrote the drama “The Last Days” (1935), a play about Pushkin without Pushkin, and the comedy “Ivan Vasilyevich” (1934-1936) about the formidable tsar and the foolish house manager, due to an error in the operation of the time machine changed centuries; the utopia "Bliss" (1934) about a sterile and ominous future with ironically planned desires of people; finally, a dramatization of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” (1938), which under the pen of Bulgakov turned into an independent play.
Mikhail Bulgakov chose the most difficult path: the path of a person who firmly delineates the boundaries of his own, individual existence, aspirations, plans and does not intend to obediently follow the rules and canons imposed from outside. In the 1930s, Bulgakov's dramaturgy was just as unacceptable for censorship as his prose had been before. In totalitarian Russia, the themes and plots of the playwright, his thoughts and his characters are impossible. "For seven recent years I made 16 things, and all of them died, except one, and that was a dramatization of Gogol! It would be naive to think that the 17th or 18th will go,” Bulgakov writes on October 5, 1937 to Vikenty Vikentievich Veresaev.
"Master and Margarita"
But “there is no such writer that he should shut up. If he fell silent, then he was not real,” these are the words of Bulgakov himself (from a letter to Stalin on May 30, 1931). And the real writer Mikhail Bulgakov continues to work. The crowning achievement of his creative career was the novel “The Master and Margarita,” which brought the writer posthumous world fame.
The novel was originally conceived as an apocryphal “gospel of the devil,” and the future title characters were absent from the first editions of the text. Over the years, the original plan became more complex and transformed, incorporating the fate of the writer himself. Later, the woman who became his third wife entered the novel - Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (they met in 1929, the marriage was formalized in the fall of 1932). A lonely writer (Master) and his faithful girlfriend (Margarita) will become no less important than the central characters in the world history of mankind.
The story of Satan's presence in Moscow in the 1930s echoes the legend of the appearance of Jesus two millennia ago. Just as they once did not recognize God, Muscovites do not recognize the devil, although Woland does not hide his well-known signs. Moreover, Woland meets seemingly enlightened heroes: the writer, editor of the anti-religious magazine Berlioz and the poet, author of the poem about Christ Ivan Bezrodny.
The events took place in front of many people and yet remained misunderstood. And only the Master, in the novel he created, is given the opportunity to restore the meaningfulness and unity of the flow of history. With the creative gift of experience, the Master “guesses” the truth in the past. The accuracy of the penetration into historical reality, witnessed by Woland, thereby confirms the accuracy and adequacy of the Master’s description of the present. Following Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", Bulgakov's novel can be called, by well-known definition, an encyclopedia of Soviet life. Life and customs new Russia, human types and characteristic actions, clothing and food, methods of communication and occupations of people - all this is unfolded before the reader with deadly irony and at the same time piercing lyricism in the panorama of several May days.
Mikhail Bulgakov builds The Master and Margarita as a “novel within a novel.” Its action takes place in two times: in Moscow in the 1930s, where Satan appears to arrange the traditional spring full moon ball, and in the ancient city of Yershalaim, in which the trial of the “wandering philosopher” Yeshua takes place by the Roman procurator Pilate. The modern and historical author of the novel about Pontius Pilate, the Master, connects both plots.
In the years when the national point of view on what was happening was asserted as “the only correct one,” Bulgakov came out with a distinctly subjective view of the events of world history, contrasting the members of the “writing collective” (MASSOLIT) with a lonely creator. It is no coincidence that the cast “ancient chapters” of the novel, telling the story of the death of Yeshua, are introduced by the writer as a truth revealed to an individual, as a personal comprehension of the Master.
The novel revealed the writer’s deep interest in issues of faith, religious or atheistic worldview. Connected by origin with a family of clergy, albeit in its “scientific” book version (Mikhail’s father is not a “father”, but a learned cleric), throughout his life Bulgakov seriously reflected on the problem of attitude towards religion, which in the thirties became closed to public discussion. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov brings to the fore creative personality in the tragic 20th century, affirming, following Pushkin, the independence of man, his historical responsibility.
Bulgakov the artist
All the artistic features of Bulgakov’s work are aimed at developing the reader’s own attitude to what is happening. Almost every writer's work begins with a riddle, which is designed to destroy the previous clarity. Thus, in “The Master and Margarita” Bulgakov deliberately gives the characters unconventional names: Satan - Woland, Jerusalem - Yershalaim, he calls the eternal enemy of the devil not Jesus, but Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The reader must independently, without relying on what is generally known, penetrate into the essence of what is happening and seem to relive in his mind the central episodes of the world history of mankind: the trial of Pilate, the death and resurrection of Jesus.
In Bulgakov’s works, the time of the present, the momentary, is necessarily correlated with the time of the “big” history of mankind, the “blue corridor of millennia.” In “The Master and Margarita” the technique is deployed throughout the entire space of the text. Thus, the current momentary values of the Soviet era are called into question and reveal their obvious transience and dubiousness.
Mikhail Bulgakov is characterized by another feature: his hero, whether in prose or drama, is returned by the author to the origins of fate. And Moliere still does not know the scale of his genius (“The Cabal of the Holy One”), and Pushkin’s poetry (“The Last Days”) is generally considered weaker than Benedict’s, and even Yeshua wanders, afraid of pain, does not feel omnipotent and immortal. The judgment of history has not yet been completed. Time unfolds, bringing with it opportunities for change. Probably, it was precisely this feature of Bulgakov’s poetics that made it impossible to stage “Batum” (1939), written as a drama not about an omnipotent ruler, but about one of many whose fate had not yet taken final shape. Finally, in Bulgakov’s works there are only two options for endings: either the thing ends with the death of the main character, or the ending remains open. The writer offers a model of the world in which there are countless possibilities. And the right to choose an action remains with the actor. Thus, the author helps the reader to feel like the creator of his own destiny. And the life of a country is made up of many individual destinies. The idea of a free and historically responsible person, “sculpting” the present and future in his own image and likeness, proposed by the writer Bulgakov, is a precious testament to his entire creative life.
"Batum"
“Batum” was the last play by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (originally it was called “The Shepherd”). Theaters were preparing for Stalin's 60th birthday. Considering the months needed to get a particularly important thing through censorship, as well as for rehearsals, the search for authors for the anniversary began back in 1937. After urgent requests from the Moscow Art Theater directorate, Bulgakov began working on a play about the leader. Refusal of a flattering order was dangerous. But Bulgakov takes an unconventional path here too: he does not write about the all-powerful leader, like the authors of other anniversary works, but talks about Dzhugashvili’s youth, starting the play with his expulsion from the seminary. Then he takes the hero through humiliation, prison and exile, that is, he turns the dictator into an ordinary dramatic character, treating the biography of the leader as material subject to free creative implementation. After reviewing the play, Stalin banned its production.
A few weeks after the news of the ban on Batum, in the fall of 1939, Bulgakov suffered from sudden blindness: a symptom of the same kidney disease from which his father died. The will of a terminally ill writer only postpones death, which occurs six months later. Almost everything the writer did was still waiting in the wings on his desk for more than a quarter of a century: the novel “The Master and Margarita,” the stories “The Heart of a Dog” and “The Life of Monsieur de Molière” (1933), as well as 16 that were never published during the writer’s lifetime. plays. After the publication of the “sunset novel,” Bulgakov will become one of the artists who defined the face of the 20th century with their creativity. This is how Woland’s prophecy addressed to the Master will come true: “Your novel will bring you more surprises.”
Since February 1940, friends and relatives were constantly on duty at M. Bulgakov’s bedside. On March 10, 1940, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov died. On March 11, a civil memorial service took place in the building of the Union of Soviet Writers. Before the funeral service, Moscow sculptor S. D. Merkurov removed the death mask from M. Bulgakov’s face.
M. Bulgakov is buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. At his grave, at the request of his wife E. S. Bulgakova, a stone was installed, nicknamed “Golgotha,” which previously lay on the grave of N. V. Gogol.
In 1966, the magazine “Moscow” began publishing the novel “The Master and Margarita” for the first time in banknotes. This happened thanks to the titanic efforts of the writer’s widow E. S. Bulgakova and the effective support of Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov. And from then on the triumphant march of the novel began. In 1973, the first complete edition of the novel appeared in the writer’s homeland; in the mid-1980s, the novel was published abroad, where it was published by the American publishing house Ardis. It was only in the 1980s that the works of the outstanding Russian writer finally began to appear in Russia one after another.
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (May 15, 1891 - March 10, 1940) was born in Kyiv in the family of an associate professor at a theological seminary. He was baptized by his own father, who considered it necessary to give his son a name in honor of the guardian of Kyiv - Archangel Michael.
Childhood
The Bulgakov family raised 7 children, of whom Mikhail was the eldest. As the writer later recalled, their mother treated them with the utmost severity. Children received an accurate understanding of what evil and good are. Their father, in turn, tried to instill in them a great love of science.
The house of the Bulgakov family was located on Andreevsky Spusk, which is famous for its energy and incredible landscapes. Boy with youth grew up in a special atmosphere of freedom and beauty.
Until the age of 9, Mikhail was educated at home, and then went to study at the Alexander Gymnasium, where the most powerful teachers in Kyiv taught at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the gymnasium period that was marked by the first creative impulses of the future writer: Mikhail showed himself as a talented young poet and prose writer, as well as a caricaturist and musician.
Youth
After graduating from high school, the question of continuing education was resolved simply: the Bulgakov family had many relatives who were doctors. And the death of Afanasy’s father from kidney disease influenced the young man’s choice. Mikhail always showed interest in how “a person works.” Already in his second year, he left his bachelor life, marrying a gymnasium graduate Tatyana Lappa.
Plans for training were interrupted by the First World War. Mikhail decided to work in a hospital, but in the fall he was assigned to the Smolensk province. So he became a zemstvo doctor.
Youth
Wartime turned out to be depressing: diphtheria was common among those who fell ill. Bulgakov had to provide help to everyone in need. He himself suffered from this, having become infected with the diphtheria bacillus from a sick boy. Morphine turned out to be a life-saving medicine. Mikhail was able to recover from diphtheria, but could not give up the drug. Soon he required two doses every day.
Being in a narcotic stupor, the writer sat down at the table and tried to convey on paper everything that “visited” his head at that moment. And only thanks to his wife he was able to get rid of his addiction.
Retired doctor
After the First World War, many intellectuals left Russia. At that time, Mikhail served as a military doctor in the North Caucasus. Severe typhus, which felled the writer, did not give him the opportunity to emigrate from the country in time. Later, he more than once reproached his wife for not making a decision and not taking him abroad. The reason for this desire was Bulgakov’s special views, which ran counter to the political elite. This can be clearly seen in his first large-scale works “Fatal Eggs”, “Heart of a Dog”, “Zoyka’s Apartment”.
Interesting fact: the respected Professor Preobrazhensky from “Heart of a Dog” had his real prototype. He became Mikhail Bulgakov’s uncle, doctor Nikolai Pokrovsky. The work itself was first published only in 1987.
In 1919, the writer left medical practice and married again. His wife was Lyubov Belozerskaya. Many people mistakenly believe that Bulgakov dedicated the work “The Master and Margarita” to her. In fact, his muse was Elena Shilovskaya, who in 1929 “received the title” of the writer’s third legal wife.
The novel “The Master and Margarita” became a real reflection of the fate of the writer himself. Despite the intertwining of modern and historical aspect, it was given the title "The Gospel According to the Devil". The main character of the novel, the Master, became the very conductor between the past and the present: the times of Pontius Pilate and modern Moscow of the 30s.
In the early 30s, the writer’s financial condition left much to be desired. He had to write a letter to Stalin asking either to give him the opportunity to work or to allow him to leave the country. This is how the theatrical period appeared in the writer’s life. He even wrote a play about Stalin, which was banned from production. The only play that was performed for many years on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater was the work “Days of the Turbins”.
In 1939, Bulgakov began again using morphine to relieve pain due to hypertensive nephrosclerosis. It was this disease that was named as the official cause of his death in March 1940. Enemies said that the writer’s departure was accelerated by his passion for the occult: evil spirits laid claim to his life.