evil. Morgaine’s character dismisses that notion with contempt, and even Gwenhwyfar
seems to finally reject it, entering the embrace of the Goddess in the aspect of the Virgin Mary.
Later works
Bradley reimagined another classic work in her 1987 novel The Firebrand, a retelling of the fall of Troy as told from Kassandra’s point of view. The novel had some success, but it did not achieve the critical acclaim of The Mists of Avalon. Part of this could be that the source work did not resonate as strongly as the Arthurian literature with contemporary
readers. Also, the thematic conflict of the older Goddess religion with Christianity is obviously absent from a book on the fall of Troy.
In 1993, Bradley returned to the Avalon series with a prequel, The Forest House, set in Briton during the Roman occupation. The title refers to the dwelling of the Druid priestesses who were resistant to the Roman occupation. The conflict revolves around a priest-
ess in love with a young Roman during the collapse of the Roman Empire. Reviewers con-
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sidered it a good companion novel to The Mists of Avalon, though it again did not receive as much critical attention as the earlier novel.
Bradley continued to write more stories in the Avalon series with Lady of Avalon and Priestess of Avalon. She died before she could complete the last novel, and it was finished by fantasy novelist Diana L. Paxson. Bradley’s last two Avalon novels explore the same
themes as the earlier books. Since Bradley’s death, Paxson has continued writing in the series with such novels as The Ancestors of Avalon (2004), which links Avalon to Atlantis, and Ravens of Avalon (2007), which focuses on the historical figure of Queen Boudica.
P. Andrew Miller
Other major works
short fiction: The Dark Intruder, and Other Stories, 1964; “A Sword of Chaos,”
1981; “The Lesson of the Inn,” 1981; The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1985;
Lythande, 1986.
nonfiction: “Responsibilities and Temptations of Women Science Fiction Writers,”
1985.
children’s literature: The Brass Dragon, 1970.
edited texts: Sword and Sorceress: An Anthology of Heroic Fantasy, 1984-2003 (series); Snows of Darkover, 1994.
Bibliography
Arbur, Rosemarie. Marion Zimmer Bradley. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House,
1985. Provides a great overall look at Bradley’s work, with biographical and chrono-
logical overviews as well as analyses of the fiction, divided into types such as
Darkover, non-Darkover science fiction, and fantasy.
Hildebrand, Kristina. The Female Reader at the Round Table: Religion and Women in
Three Contemporary Arthurian Texts. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Library, 2001. Places Bradley’s work within the context of the history of the Arthurian legends
and women’s literature in general.
Kaler, Anne K. “Bradley and the Beguines: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Debt to the
Beguinal Societies in Her Use of Sisterhood in Her Darkover Novels.” In Heroines of
Popular Culture, edited by Pat Browne. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1987. Discusses Bradley’s use of elements from real medi-
eval societies of women in creating her Darkover novels.
King, Betty. Women of the Future: The Female Main Character in Science Fiction.
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Provides background on how women charac-
ters have been portrayed in science fiction, placing Bradley’s work in historical
perspective.
Paxson, Diana L. “Marion Zimmer Bradley and The Mists of Avalon.” Arthuriana 9, no. 1
(Spring, 1999): 110-126. The author who has continued the series of Avalon books ex-
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Bradley, Marion Zimmer
amines the biographical roots of Bradley’s female spirituality in The Mists of Avalon.
Riggs, Don. “The Survival of the Goddess in Marie de France and Marion Zimmer
Bradley.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 9, no. 1 (1998): 15-23. Compares the depictions of the goddess in twelfth century writer Marie de France’s Lanval and in Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.
Roberson, Jennifer, ed. Return to Avalon: A Celebration of Marion Zimmer Bradley. New York: DAW Books, 1996. Collection of appreciative essays—written primarily by
other female luminaries writing in the science-fiction and fantasy genres—provides
information about Bradley’s fiction.
Russ, Joanna. “Recent Feminist Utopias.” In Future Females: A Critical Anthology, edited by Marleen S. Barr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popu-
lar Press, 1981. Draws comparisons among many different feminist utopias created in
works of fiction, including Bradley’s The Shattered Chain.
Schwartz, Susan M. “Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Ethic of Freedom.” In The Feminine Eye, edited by Tom Staicar. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. Discusses the portrayal of
women in the Darkover novels, particularly The Shattered Chain. Examines Bradley’s themes of choice and the price of choice and also emphasizes the importance of risk
taking and choices involving tests of will and courage in the Darkover novels.
Tober, Lee Ann. “Why Change the Arthur Story? Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of
Avalon.” Extrapolation 34, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 147-157. Argues the feminist significance of Bradley’s novel as an inversion of the male-centered Arthur legend.
31
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
Born: Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire; May 15, 1891
Died: Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union (now in Russia); March 10, 1940
Also known as: Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov
Principal long fiction
Belaya gvardiya, 1927, 1929 (2 volumes; The White Guard, 1971)
Teatralny roman, 1965 ( Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, 1967)
Master i Margarita, 1966-1967 (uncensored version, 1973; The Master and
Margarita, 1967)
Sobache serdtse, 1968 (novella; wr. 1925; reliable text, 1969; The Heart of a Dog, 1968)
Other literary forms
Mikhail Bulgakov (bewl-GAH-kuhf) wrote some thirty-six plays, of which eleven
were published and eight performed during his lifetime. His writings for theater and film include adaptations from Miguel de Cervantes, Molière, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Gogol,
and Leo Tolstoy. Only one of the opera libretti Bulgakov composed for the Bolshoi The-
ater, Rachel (wr. 1938, pr. 1947), based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, was ever produced. Among his more notable plays made available in English during the 1960’s and
1970’s are Adam i Eva (pb. 1971; Adam and Eve, 1971), Dni Turbinykh (pr. 1926; Days of the Turbins, 1934), Beg (pr. 1957; Flight, 1969), Zoykina kvartira (pr. 1926; Zoya’s Apartment, 1970), Ivan Vasilievich (pb. 1965; English translation, 1974), and Posledniye dni (Pushkin) (pr. 1943; The Last Days, 1976). Bulgakov also wrote numerous short stories, many of them collected in the volumes titled Diavoliada (1925; Diaboliad, and Other Stories, 1972), Zapiski iunogo vracha (1963; A Country Doctor’s Notebook, 1975), and Traktat o zhilishche (1926; A Treatise on Housing, 1972). He also published miscellaneous journalism. Bulgakov’s close identification with the life of Molière produced one of his most interesting plays, Kabala svyatosh (pr. 1936; A Cabal of Hypocrites, 1972; also known as Molière), as well as a novelistic biography, Zhizn gospodina de Molyera (1962; The Life of Monsieur de Molière, 1970).
Achievements
Some twenty-five years after his death, Mikhail Bulgakov began to receive increasing
recognition—both in the Soviet Union and abroad—as a major figure in modern Rus
sian
literature. The Master and Margarita is a complex, ambitious masterpiece that has won an intensely loyal readership and much critical scrutiny since its first serialized publication in 1966-1967. This novel’s posthumous success in turn began to direct attention to Bulgakov’s other neglected works.
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The hazards of cultural life under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin frustrated Bulgakov’s as-
pirations in prose fiction, where he did his finest work, and channeled him into the theater, where, though productive, he was probably temperamentally out of place. Bulgakov’s
narratives combine acute, if perforce oblique, social analysis with a strain of playful fantasy. Beyond the deprivation, hypocrisy, and cruelty of contemporary Soviet life, his
Horatian satires suggest a transcendent spiritual force. In The Master and Margarita and The White Guard, it is tender devotion to a beautiful, mysterious woman that represents the apocalyptic possibility of overcoming an oppressive present existence. Black Snow offers the advice that “you have to love your characters. If you don’t, I don’t advise anybody to try writing; the result is bound to be unfortunate.” This sentimental belief in the liberating power of love—of characters for one another, of author for reader—is tempered by
terminal melancholia. In the imperfect world portrayed by Bulgakov, those in power are
never graced with imagination, though they must be humored, but it is the power of
imagination and of humor that lifts the reader beyond the tyranny of the quotidian.
There is at least an allusion to Faust in almost all of Bulgakov’s books, where the quest for an elusive truth becomes an explicit and central theme. Bulgakov’s work frequently
foregrounds itself, calling attention to its own formal inventions in the service of a sense of values against which the elaborate structures of society and art seem petty and transient indeed.
Biography
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, the eldest of seven children, was born in Kiev on
May 15, 1891, into a family that was both devout and intellectual. His father, who died
when Mikhail was sixteen, was a professor of divinity at the Kiev Theological Academy.
Bulgakov developed an early interest in music and the theater, but he pursued a medical
degree at Kiev University. In 1913, he married Tatyana Nikolaevna Lappa, and in 1916 he
graduated with distinction as a doctor. He subsequently served as a military doctor in remote village hospitals, settings that were to provide the material for the stories in A Country Doctor’s Notebook. The isolation depressed him, and he attempted to obtain his release, only succeeding in 1918 after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Bulgakov returned to Kiev to establish a private practice in venereology and dermatol-
ogy. During this time, the tense atmosphere of which is re-created in The White Guard, Kiev was a battleground for the Germans, the Ukrainian nationalists, the Bolsheviks, and the Whites. In November, 1919, Bulgakov fled south to the Caucasian town of Vladikavkaz. While he was confined to bed with typhus, Vladikavkaz was captured by the Bol-
sheviks. He abandoned the practice of medicine and began devoting himself entirely to
writing.
In 1921, Bulgakov moved to Moscow, where, amid general hardship, he attempted to
support himself and his wife through a variety of literary and journalistic jobs. In 1924, he divorced Tatyana and married Lyubov Yevgenievna Belozerskaya. Soon thereafter, with
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the publication of satiric stories later collected in Diavoliada, Bulgakov began achieving some recognition and was able to abandon the newspaper work he detested. The publication, in 1925, of parts of The White Guard, based on his experiences in Kiev during the civil war, dramatically changed his life in ways recounted in the autobiographical novel Black Snow. Bulgakov’s work came to the attention of the producers of the Moscow Art Theater, and he was asked to adapt The White Guard for the stage. The result, after considerable revision, was Days of the Turbins, which opened in October, 1926, to intense, po-larized reaction. Bulgakov was harshly attacked for portraying the opponents of Bolshev-
ism too sympathetically, but the play proved enormously popular. During its lengthy run, Stalin himself saw it fifteen times.
A sudden celebrity, Bulgakov continued writing plays, but by the end of the decade, as
Soviet cultural and political life became severely repressive, his works were banned, and his financial position deteriorated. Near despair, he sent letters in 1930 to Soviet officials complaining of the campaign of vilification against him and his inability to get his work accepted. Stalin’s personal intercession resulted in Bulgakov’s appointment as a producer at the Moscow Art Theater. His subsequent years in the theater were productive but frustrating, in part because of friction with the flamboyant director Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose production of A Cabal of Hypocrites in 1936 led Bulgakov to resign in disgust from the Moscow Art Theater. For the remainder of his life, he was employed by the Bolshoi
Theater as librettist and consultant.
In 1929, Bulgakov had begun a clandestine love affair with Elena Sergeyevna
Shilovskaya, wife of the chief of staff of the Moscow Military District. In 1932, after both succeeded in obtaining divorces, they were married, and Bulgakov adopted Elena’s five-year-old son, Sergey. Bulgakov’s happiness with and devotion to his third wife, to whom
he, with failing eyesight, probably dictated Black Snow in 1939, are reflected in The Master and Margarita. The earliest version of the latter was begun as early as 1928, but Bulgakov destroyed that manuscript in 1929. He continued refining a revised version until his death, in Moscow, on March 10, 1940.
After Bulgakov’s death, the official attitude toward his work in the Soviet Union
ranged from indifference to hostility, and very few of his writings remained available.
During the brief thaw in Soviet cultural repression following Stalin’s death, a commission was established to rehabilitate Bulgakov’s reputation, and by the late 1960’s most of his major works were being published in the Soviet Union for the first time.
Analysis
Mikhail Bulgakov never took advantage of the opportunity to flee Russia during the
revolution and its turbulent aftermath, and his fiction is very much a product of Russian life during the first two decades of the Soviet regime. Bulgakov’s social commentary is not oblique enough to have averted the ire and the proscription of powerful contemporaries, or to keep later readers from recognizing the quality of roman à clef in much of what he
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Bulgakov, Mikhail
wrote. The key, however, is not simply in details of his own biography—friends, adversaries, and a pet cat persistently transposed into a fictional realm. More important, it is in his ability to render the plight of the creative individual in a system designed to subdue him.
Within the carefully limned landscapes of modern Kiev and Moscow, Bulgakov’s charac-
ters dramatize the limitations and hubris of temporal human power. His books, then, are
not merely the frustrated effusions of an author encountering formidable obstacles to his ambitions, nor are they merely perceptive analyses of the kind of community Stalinist social engineering was begetting. Beyond Bulgakov’s contempt for contemporary mischief
is a veritably religious sense of a universal spiritual force and a conviction that sic transit gloria mundi. The White Guard thus concludes on a consoling note: “Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger and pestilence.” It is this spiritual perspective that endows Bulgakov’s narratives with more than a parochial sociological or historical
interest.
The tone of melancholy that suffuses Bulgakov’s works is a c
onsequence of the futility
he sees in the artist’s struggle against the mighty of this world, and most of his sympathetic characters are more than half in love with easeful death. Creativity, love, and good humor do, nevertheless, triumph. To reduce Bulgakov’s fictions to the bare formula of a struggle between sensitivity and brutishness and between eternity and the moment is to miss the
mournful exuberance of his comédies larmoyantes. Not only Black Snow, the subtitle of which proclaims it, but also Bulgakov’s other books are theatrical novels. The spirited
play of a harried author drawn to and disappointed by the theater, they employ self-
conscious devices, such as apostrophes to the reader, impudent violations of verisimili-
tude, and encased narratives, to enact a liberation not only from the oppressive worlds they depict but also from the literary instrument of emancipation itself. Black Snow concludes with a deflationary fictional afterword, and it is night on the final pages of The White Guard, The Master and Margarita, and The Heart of a Dog. Like William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611) abjuring its own magic, Bulgakov’s novels provide bittersweet crepuscular valediction to the powers of temporal authority and to the verbal artifices that their inventive author assembles.
The White Guard
Bulgakov’s first novel, and the only one to be published (at least in part) in his lifetime, The White Guard is set in Kiev in the winter of 1918. It is the moment at which the hetman Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky, who has ruled with the support of the Germans, flees the
city, and the forces of the Ukrainian nationalist Semyon Petlyura prove temporarily triumphant over Whites and Bolsheviks. The White Guard is a polyphonic arrangement of a variety of characters and incidents within a brief, dramatic period in the history of modern Kiev. Its focus, however, is on the fate of one family, the Turbins, representative of a venerable way of life that is disintegrating as Ukrainian society undergoes radical change.
The Turbin children have recently buried their mother, and twenty-eight-year-old
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Alexei, a physician, his twenty-four-year-old sister Elena, and their seventeen-year-old brother Nikolka, a student, attempt to maintain family traditions and values, which are
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