Mikhail Bulgakov
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Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (or Bulhakov, Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков; May 15 (May 3 Old Style), 1891–March 10, 1940) was a Soviet novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century. Although Ukrainian born, he wrote in Russian. He is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born 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 Bulgakov, who enlisted as a field doctor, ended up in the Caucasus, where he eventually began working as a journalist. Despite his relatively favored status under the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin, Bulgakov was prevented from either emigrating or visiting his brothers in the West.
In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa. In 1916, he graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University. In 1921, he moved with Tatiana to Moscow. Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Lyubov' Belozerskaya. In 1932, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Yelena Shilovskaya. 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. However, most of his works were consigned to his desk drawer for several decades. In 1938 he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate and received a personal phone call from Stalin himself, unfortunately denying him the ability to migrate.
Bulgakov died from an inherited kidney disorder in 1940 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
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Works
Even during his life, Bulgakov was famous for his books Notes of a Country Doctor and The White Guard (Белая гвардия). He was, for a short period, the favorite playwright of Joseph Stalin. Stalin was fond of the play Days of the Turbins (Дни Турбиных), which was based on The White Guard. This perhaps saved his life in the year of terror 1937, when nearly all writers who did not support the dictatorship of Stalin were imprisoned and killed, as for example Osip Mandelstam. Bulgakov never supported the regime, and in several of his works mocked it: Heart of a Dog, Flight, etc. In 1929 all of his works, including The White Guard, were banned; Bulgakov couldn't publish anything and Stalin refused his request to emigrate. He did work as a literary bureaucrat, which contributed to the satire of The Master and Margarita.
It is the fantasy satiric novel The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), published almost thirty years after his death, in 1967, 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. In the opinion of many, The Master and Margarita is the best Russian novel of the century and the best of the Soviet novels, although it is difficult to imagine Joseph Stalin approving the novel. The novel 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.
Various authors and musicians have credited The Master and Margarita as inspiration for certain works. Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, for example, clearly was influenced by Bulgakov's masterwork. The Rolling Stones have said the novel was key in their song, "Sympathy for the Devil". The grunge band Pearl Jam were influenced by the novel's confrontation between Yeshua Ha-Notsri, that is, Jesus, and Pontius Pilate for their 1998 song, "Pilate". The Franz Ferdinand song "Love and Destroy" was based on a scene where Margarita flies over Moscow on her way to the Walpurgis Night Ball.
Heart of a Dog, a story often compared to Frankenstein, features a professor who implants human testicles and pituitary gland into dog named Sharik. Sharik 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 was turned into a comic opera called The Murder of Comrade Sharik by William Bergsma in 1973.
The Fatal Eggs novel tells of the events after a Professor Persikov, who in experimentation with eggs, discovers a red ray that accelerates growth in living organisms. At the time a illness passes through the chicken of Moscow, killing most of them off, 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 and 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 wreaked havoc in the suburbs of Moscow and killed most of the workers on the farm. The propaganda machine then turns on the 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.
Famous quote
"Manuscripts do not burn" — The Master and Margarita
Bibliography
- Notes on Cuffs
- Notes of a Country Doctor (Записки юного врача)
- Days of the Turbins (Дни Турбиных) (play)
- The Cabal of Hypocrites (play)
- Pushkin (The Last Days) (play)
- Batum (play)
- The White Guard (Белая гвардия)
- Life of Monsieur de Molière
- Fatal Eggs
- Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце)
- The Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита)
External links
- Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (http://cr.middlebury.edu/public/russian/Bulgakov/public_html/)
- Mikhail Bulgakov (http://users.efni.com/~paradox/bulgakov/)
- Bulgakov.ru (http://www.bulgakov.ru/) - amateurish but very high-quality site, devoted solely to Bulgakov and his works (in Russian)
- Mikhail Bulgakov (http://bulgakow.chkebelski.de/index_e.html) - three languages site (German, English and Russian)bg:Михаил Булгаков
de:Michail Afanasjewitsch Bulgakow eo:Miĥail BULGAKOV fr:Mikhaïl Boulgakov he:מיכאיל בולגקוב nl:Michail Boelgakov pl:Michaił Bułhakow ro:Mihail Bulgakov ru:Булгаков, Михаил Афанасьевич sk:Michail Bulgakov fi:Mihail Bulgakov sv:Mikhail Bulgakov