those of a comfortable Russian intellectual home. Public events make this impossible,
however, and the collapse of the kind of humane civilization that the Turbin family exemplifies—with which Bulgakov, whose background was similar, is, despite the censor,
sympathetic—is inevitable with the victory of Petlyura’s troops.
Captain Sergey Talberg, the opportunistic scoundrel to whom Elena is married, aban-
dons her to seek safety and another woman in Paris. The hetman, in the cowardly disguise of a German officer, likewise deserts Kiev at its moment of greatest danger. Nevertheless, Alexei and Nikolka, along with many others, enlist in the loyalist army in a futile effort to repulse Petlyura’s advance into the city. Bulgakov depicts a range of heroism and knavery on all sides during the months of crisis in Kiev. The narrative weaves multiple subplots of combat and domestic drama into a vivid account of an obsolescent society under siege.
Through it all, the Turbin house, number 13 St. Alexei’s Hill, remains for the family
and its friends a fragile sanctuary. Nikolka barely escapes the violence, and Alexei, who is wounded, miraculously survives battle and an attack of typhus with the gracious assistance of a mysterious beauty named Julia Reiss. Despite the grim situation, gentle comic relief is provided by characters such as the miserly neighbor Vasilisa and the benevolent bumpkin Lariosik, who comes to stay with his relatives, the Turbins.
The apocalyptic tone of The White Guard is supported by religious allusions, particularly to the biblical book of Revelation. The music for the opera Faust remains open on the Turbin piano from the beginning of the novel to its end, and the reader is reminded of enduring values that transcend the contingencies of politics:
But long after the Turbins and Talbergs have departed this life the keys will ring out again and Valentine will step up to the footlights, the aroma of perfume will waft from the
boxes and at home beautiful women under the lamplight will play the music, because
Faust, like the Shipwright of Saardam, is quite immortal.
As the novel concludes, Petlyura’s victory, too, is ephemeral, as the Bolsheviks advance.
Night descends on the Dnieper, and each of several characters dreams of something far beyond the petty intrigues of daylight Kiev. As in all of Bulgakov’s fictions, a foregrounded narrative voice, relying on rhetorical questions, playful and ingenious connections and
summaries, and an overtly evocative landscape, impels the reader beyond the trifles of
wars and words.
Black Snow
Black Snow, an unfinished work, was discovered in 1965 by the commission estab-
lished during the post-Stalin thaw to rehabilitate Bulgakov. An account of the emergence of an obscure hack named Sergey Leontievich Maxudov as a literary and theatrical celebrity in Moscow, it draws heavily on Bulgakov’s own experiences in writing The White
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Guard and adapting it for the Moscow Art Theater as Days of the Turbins. It provides a lively portrait of the artist as a melancholic and misunderstood figure and of a cultural establishment inimical to genuine creativity.
The novel begins with a letter from a producer named Xavier Borisovich Ilchin sum-
moning Maxudov to his office at the Academy of Drama. Ilchin has read Maxudov’s un-
acclaimed novel and is eager for him to adapt it for the stage. Next follows a flashback recounting how Maxudov conceived his book and how, as an obscure employee of the trade
journal Shipping Gazette, he signed a contract for its publication in The Motherland shortly before that magazine folded. The flashback concludes with an account of how
Maxudov’s life is transformed after he signs a contract for the production of Black Snow, his stage version of the novel, by the Independent Theater.
Maxudov soon finds himself a victim of the rivalries and jealousies of figures in the
theatrical world. In particular, he is caught between the two directors of the Independent Theater, Aristarkh Platonovich, who is currently off in India, and Ivan Vasilievich; neither has spoken to the other in forty years. Ivan Vasilievich is clearly modeled on Stanislavsky, and grotesque descriptions portray the tyrannical director at work, rehearsing his actors in Black Snow with his celebrated “method.” The hapless dramatist makes a convincing case that “the famous theory was utterly wrong for my play.”
Black Snow employs a sophisticated narrative perspective to distance the reader both from its inept protagonist and from the bizarre characters he encounters. Its two parts are both written by Maxudov himself in the form of a memoir. An afterword, however, introduces a new, anonymous voice who explains how Maxudov sent the manuscript to him
shortly before killing himself by jumping off a bridge in Kiev. This second narrator de-
scribes the narrative that the reader has just finished as suffering from “slovenly style” and as the “fruit of a morbid imagination.” Furthermore, he points out its egregious inaccuracies, among which is the fact that Maxudov never did have anything to do with the theater.
The effect of this coda, as of those in Knut Hamsun’s Pan (1894; English translation, 1920) and director Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), is to cast retrospective doubt on the reliability of everything that precedes it. Is Black Snow a caustic mockery of philistine bureaucrats, or is it a case study in the psychopathology of a deluded author manqué? Or perhaps both? Maxudov, distraught over frustrations with the Independent Theater, does admit that he is a melancholic and describes an early suicide at-
tempt, aborted when he heard a recording of Faust coming from the apartment downstairs.
Black Snow, with its examination of the artist as victim—of powerful boors and of himself—and its lucid blend of whimsy and social observation, is a fitting commentary on and companion to Bulgakov’s other works.
The Master and Margarita
Perhaps the supreme Russian novel of the twentieth century, and one of the most en-
dearing modern texts in any language, The Master and Margarita was first published in 37
Bulgakov, Mikhail
Critical Survey of Long Fiction
abridged form in 1966-1967 and immediately created a sensation. It is a rich fusion of at least four realms and plots: the banal world of contemporary Moscow, containing the
Griboyedov House, the Variety Theater, the apartments at 302-b Sadovaya, and a psychi-
atric hospital; ancient Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate suffers torment over whether to
crucify Yeshua Ha-Nozri; the antics of Woland and his satanic crew, including Koroviev,
Azazello, Behemoth, and Hella; and the activities of the Master, utterly devoted to his art, and of Margarita, utterly devoted to him. Throughout, chapters of the novel crosscut from one of these subplots to another and ultimately suggest that perhaps they are not so distinct after all.
What sets the complex machinery of Bulgakov’s novel in motion is a four-day visit to
Soviet Moscow by the devil, referred to as Woland, and his assistants. They gleefully
wreak havoc with the lives of the bureaucrats, hypocrites, opportunists, and dullards they encounter. They do, however, befriend and assist the Master, an alienated writer who has been hospitalized after the worldly failure of his literary efforts. The Master’s beloved Margarita consents to serve as hostess at Satan’s ball and is rewarded with supernatural powers. An inferior poet named Ivan Homeless finds himself in the same psychiatric
clinic as the Master and gradually becomes his disciple. The lifework of the Master is a novel about Pontius Pilate, and chapters from it, with manifest parallels to the situation in contemporary Moscow, are interspersed throughout Bulgakov’s novel.
Woland’s performance at the Variety Theater is billed as a “black magic act accompa-
nied by a full exposé,” and The Master and Margarita itself, an absorb
ing blend of fantasy and verisimilitude presented with subversive self-consciousness, could be similarly described. The playful narrative voice that overtly addresses the reader mocks not only the characters but itself as well. Numerous authors among the dramatis personae, including Ivan, the Master, Matthu Levi, and Ryukhin, as well as characters given musical names
such as Berlioz, Stravinsky, and Rimsky, foreground the process of fabrication and rein-
force one of the novel’s persistent themes—the elusive nature of truth.
Most of the characters in Moscow refuse to recognize anything problematic about
truth. Arrogantly convinced that human reason is adequate to any cognitive task, they
stubbornly deny the supernatural that erupts in the form of Woland or that is evoked in the story of Yeshua. Like the other hack writers who congregate at the Griboyedov House,
Ivan Homeless would just as soon take life on the most comfortable terms possible, but his spirit will not permit him to do so. Torn between the material and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal, the collective and the individual, Ivan is diagnosed as schizophrenic and is hospitalized. His progress as a patient and as a writer will be marked by his success in reconciling opposing realms. Bulgakov, the novelist as master weaver, seems to be suggesting that both artistic achievement and mental health are dependent on a harmony
between ostensibly disparate materials.
The Master, like Bulgakov himself, attempted to destroy his book, but, as Woland
points out, “manuscripts don’t burn.” Art survives and transcends the hardships and iniq-38
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Bulgakov, Mikhail
uities of particular places and times. It ridicules the obtuseness of temporal authorities with the example of immortal authority. In one of many echoes of the Faust legend, The Master and Margarita chooses as its epigraph Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s reference to “that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” Bulgakov’s ambitious novel certainly does not deny the oppressive reality of contemporary society, but its humor is restorative, and it moves toward an exhilarating, harmonious vision that would exclude nothing. It concludes with a benedictory kiss from a spectral Margarita.
The Heart of a Dog
The most overt of Bulgakov’s statements on the Russian Revolution, The Heart of a
Dog, though written in 1925, was published in English in 1968 and in Russian in 1969. It is a satiric novella about an experiment performed by the celebrated Moscow surgeon
Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky, who takes a stray mongrel dog, Sharik, and trans-
forms him into a human being named Sharikov. Much of the tale is narrated by Sharikov
himself, who is not necessarily better off for his transformation. To perform the operation, Preobrazhensky has inserted the pituitary of a vulgar criminal into the brain of the dog.
The result is an uncouth, rowdy human being who, though adept at language and even at
repeating the political slogans supplied by the officious house committee chairman,
Shvonder, proves incapable of satisfying the standards of civilized behavior demanded by Preobrazhensky. Hence, convinced that the experiment is a fiasco, he reverses it and turns Sharikov back into Sharik.
The Heart of a Dog features Bulgakov’s characteristic blend of fantasy and social analysis. It parabolically raises the question of the malleability of human nature and of the possibility of social melioration. Once again, it exposes to ridicule the arrogance of those who would presume to shape others’ lives and raises doubts about the efficacy and desirability of social engineering, such as Russia was undergoing in the 1920’s. The book suggests a
fatal incompatibility between the proletariat and the intelligentsia, implying that the humane values of the latter are threatened by the former. It seems to counsel humble caution in tampering with the arrangements of the world.
Steven G. Kellman
Other major works
short fiction: Diavoliada, 1925 ( Diaboliad, and Other Stories, 1972); Traktat o zhilishche, 1926 ( A Treatise on Housing, 1972); Zapiski iunogo vracha, 1963 ( A Country Doctor’s Notebook, 1975); Notes on the Cuff, and Other Stories, 1991.
plays: Dni Turbinykh, pr. 1926 (adaptation of his novel Belaya gvardiya; Days of the Turbins, 1934); Zoykina kvartira, pr. 1926 ( Zoya’s Apartment, 1970); Bagrovy ostrov, pr.
1928 (adaptation of his short story; The Crimson Island, 1972); Kabala svyatosh, pr. 1936
(wr. 1929; A Cabal of Hypocrites, 1972; also known as Molière); Don Kikhot, pr. 1941; Posledniye dni (Pushkin), pr. 1943 (wr. 1934-1935; The Last Days, 1976); Beg, pr. 1957
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Critical Survey of Long Fiction
(wr. 1928; Flight, 1969); Ivan Vasilievich, pb. 1965 (wr. 1935; English translation, 1974); Blazhenstvo, pb. 1966 (wr. 1934; Bliss, 1976); Adam i Eva, pb. 1971 (wr. 1930-1931; Adam and Eve, 1971); The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov, 1972; Rashel, pb. 1972 (wr.
c. 1936; libretto; adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Mademoiselle Fifi”);
Minin i Pozharskii, pb. 1976 (wr. 1936; libretto); Batum, pb. 1977 (wr. 1938); Six Plays, 1991.
nonfiction: Zhizn gospodina de Molyera, 1962 ( The Life of Monsieur de Molière, 1970).
translation: L’Avare, 1936 (of Molière’s play).
Bibliography
Barratt, Andrew. Between Two Worlds: A Critical Introduction to “The Master and
Margarita.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Puts forth an imaginative approach to understanding Bulgakov’s most important work. Describes the genesis of
the novel and its reception inside and outside the Soviet Union.
Curtis, J. A. E. Manuscripts Don’t Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, a Life in Letters and Diaries.
Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1992. Contains previously unpublished letters and
a diary that were believed to be lost. Groups of Bulgakov’s letters, diaries, and
speeches are arranged in chronological order and interspersed with biographical chap-
ters, providing context for the primary source material.
Drawicz, Andrzej. The Master and the Devil: A Study of Mikhail Bulgakov. Translated by Kevin Windle. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Analyzes all of Bulgakov’s
prose and dramatic works, placing them within the context of the author’s life and
times. The initial chapters focus on Bulgakov’s life, providing new biographical infor-
mation, and subsequent chapters concentrate on his novels and other writings.
Haber, Edythe C. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Early Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Discusses Bulgakov’s early life and career, describing how his novels
and other works arose from his experiences during the Russian Revolution, civil war,
and early years of Communism. Traces the themes and characters of his early works and
demonstrates how he perfected these fictional elements in The Master and Margarita.
Milne, Lesley. Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Describes some of the features that are essential to understanding
Bulgakov’s outlook on life and the themes and techniques of his works. Includes de-
tailed and original interpretations of some of Bulgakov’s earliest works as well as a serious examination of The Master and Margarita.
_______, ed. Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright. New York: Routledge, 1996. Collection of twenty-one essays surveys Bulgakov’s works from a wide variety of perspec-
tives. Several essays examine The Master and Margarita, including one that compares the novel to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Includes an index of
Bulgakov’s works.
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Proffer, Ellendea. Bulgakov: Life and Work. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984. Comp
rehensive treatment of Bulgakov’s career provides information and analysis of some early
works that previously received little scholarly attention. Proffer’s portrait of Bulgakov contrasts with that of other critics, who depict him as being a suppressed and haunted
author under the Stalinist regime.
Weir, Justin. The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and
Nabokov. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Analyzes novels by three Russian authors—Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s
Doktor Zhivago (1957; Doctor Zhivago, 1958), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Dar (1952; The Gift, 1963)—to describe how these authors reveal themselves through their writing, transforming the traditional authors into the heroes of their novels.
Wright, A. Colin. Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Thorough critical biography examines The Master and
Margarita and other works and places them within the context of Bulgakov’s life. Includes indexes and bibliography.
41
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Born: Richmond, Virginia; April 14, 1879
Died: Richmond, Virginia; May 5, 1958
Principal long fiction
The Eagle’s Shadow, 1904
The Cords of Vanity, 1909
The Soul of Melicent, 1913 (republished as Domnei, 1920)
The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, 1915
The Cream of the Jest, 1917
Jurgen, 1919
Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances, 1921
The High Place, 1923
The Silver Stallion, 1926
Something About Eve, 1927
The Biography of the Life of Manuel: The Works of James Branch Cabell, 1927-
1930 (18 volumes)
The White Robe, 1928
The Way of Ecben, 1929
Smirt, 1934
Smith, 1935
Smire, 1937
The King Was in His Counting House, 1938
Hamlet Had an Uncle, 1940
The First Gentleman of America, 1942
There Were Two Pirates, 1946
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