A mysterious stranger appears in a Moscow park. Soon he and his retinue have astonished the locals with the magic show to end all magic shows. But why are they really here, and what has it got to do with the beautiful Margarita, or her lover, the Master, a silenced writer? A carnival for the senses and a diabolical extravaganza, this most exuberant of Russian novels was staged in this adaptation at Chichester Festival Theatre.
A comic novel about the theater world in early Soviet Russia and a “biting attack on censorship” (The Guardian, UK). From the author of The Master and Margarita, this semi-autobiographical satirical novel paints a vibrant portrait of life behind the curtains of the Russian literary and theater arenas in the early decades of the twentieth century. Maxudov is a failed novelist who, after contemplating suicide, adapts his novel into a play that—seemingly at random—is chosen to be produced at the renowned Independent Theatre. As it so often does in theater, chaos ensues—including bloodthirsty battles between the show’s two co-directors (modeled on Stanislavsky, the famed inventor of Method Acting, and his co-director) over control of the production; near-constant drama brewing between the actors; and the playwright’s own growing host of misgivings and insecurities about his place in the theatrical community. With each rehearsal turning more disastrous than the last, it becomes less and less clear whether Maxudov’s play will ever be performed at all… “A masterpiece of black comedy.” —The Irish Times
Bulgakov's brilliant novel, first published in 1925, portrays his beloved city of Kiev as it is torn apart during a few crucial weeks in 1918, seen through the eyes of a family fleeing the Russian revolution. With cinematic vividness, Bulgakov puts us on the streets of a gracious, historic city as it is successively besieged by invading Germans, Ukrainian nationalists, the Red Guard of the Bolsheviks, and the White Guard loyal to the recently executed tsar. The Turbin siblings, once wealthy and secure in Russia, have fled to Kiev to escape the ongoing civil war, but find themselves surrounded by chaos and danger. As Bulgakov depicts their devotion to a doomed cause and the surreal horrors they face, he provides a view of history that is both grandly panoramic and movingly intimate. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
Part autobiography, part fiction, this early work by the author of The Master and Margarita shows a master at the dawn of his craft, and a nation divided by centuries of unequal progress. In 1916 a 25-year-old, newly qualified doctor named Mikhail Bulgakov was posted to the remote Russian countryside. He brought to his position a diploma and a complete lack of field experience. And the challenges he faced didn’t end there: he was assigned to cover a vast and sprawling territory that was as yet unvisited by modern conveniences such as the motor car, the telephone, and electric lights. The stories in A Country Doctor’s Notebook are based on this two-year window in the life of the great modernist. Bulgakov candidly speaks of his own feelings of inadequacy, and warmly and wittily conjures episodes such as peasants applying medicine to their outer clothing rather than their skin, and finding himself charged with delivering a baby—having only read about the procedure in text books. Not yet marked by the dark fantasy of his later writing, this early work features a realistic and wonderfully engaging narrative voice—the voice, indeed, of twentieth century Russia’s greatest writer.
Satan, Judas, a Soviet writer, and a talking black cat named Behemoth populate this satire, “a classic of twentieth-century fiction” (The New York Times). In 1930s Moscow, Satan decides to pay the good people of the Soviet Union a visit. In old Jerusalem, the fateful meeting of Pilate and Yeshua and the murder of Judas in the garden of Gethsemane unfold. At the intersection of fantasy and realism, satire and unflinching emotional truths, Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita eloquently lampoons every aspect of Soviet life under Stalin’s regime, from politics to art to religion, while interrogating the complexities between good and evil, innocence and guilt, and freedom and oppression. Spanning from Moscow to Biblical Jerusalem, a vibrant cast of characters—a “magician” who is actually the devil in disguise, a giant cat, a witch, a fanged assassin—sow mayhem and madness wherever they go, mocking artists, intellectuals, and politicians alike. In and out of the fray weaves a man known only as the Master, a writer demoralized by government censorship, and his mysterious lover, Margarita. Burned in 1928 by the author and restarted in 1930, The Master and Margarita was Bulgakov’s last completed creative work before his death. It remained unpublished until 1966—and went on to become one of the most well-regarded works of Russian literature of the twentieth century, adapted or referenced in film, television, radio, comic strips, theater productions, music, and opera.
White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakovs semi-autobiographical first novel, is the story of the Turbin family in Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin have just lost their mothertheir father had died years beforeand find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the Ukraine in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the context of this familys personal loss and the social turmoil surrounding them, Bulgakov creates a brilliant picture of the existential crises brought about by the revolution and the loss of social, moral, and political certainties. He confronts the reader with the bewildering cruelty that ripped Russian life apart at the beginning of the last century as well as with the extraordinary ways in which the Turbins preserved their humanity. In this volume Marian Schwartz, a leading translator, offers the first complete and accurate translation of the definitive original text of Bulgakovs novel. She includes the famous dream sequence, omitted in previous translations, and beautifully solves the stylistic issues raised by Bulgakovs ornamental prose. Readers with an interest in Russian literature, culture, or history will welcome this superb translation of Bulgakovs important early work. This edition also contains an informative historical essay by Evgeny Dobrenko.
Two plays deal with the efforts of a group of white officers to survive after the end of the Civil War, and an engineer who travels into the past in a time machine and returns with Ivan the Terrible.
The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of The Master and Margarita - now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature - was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression did not only apply to his art: in 1926 his personal diaries were seized by the authorities. From then on he confined his thoughts to letters to his friends and family, as well as to public figures such as Stalin and his fellow Soviet writer Gorky.This ample selection from the diaries and letters of Mikhail Bulgakov, mostly translated for the first time into English, provides an insightful glimpse into the author's world and into a fascinating period of Russian history and literature, telling the tragic tale of the fate of an artist under a totalitarian regime.
The Heart of a Dog is a novella that blends science fiction with sharp social commentary. The story centers on a stray dog named Sharik, who is taken in by a scientist, Professor Preobrazhensky. The professor performs an experimental surgery on Sharik, transplanting human organs into the dog, which causes Sharik to transform into a human-like creature named Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov. Sharikov's transformation and subsequent behavior serve as a biting satire of the Soviet attempt to create a new socialist citizen. Sharikov becomes a crude, vulgar, and opportunistic character, embodying the worst traits of humanity. The novella explores themes of identity, the ethics of scientific experimentation, and the clash between nature and nurture.
“Bulgakov’s strong point was his ability to amplify the roots of man’s dementia, the howls of political pandemonium . . . a lively collection.” —The Washington Post Book World Mikhail Bulgakov’s Diaboliad and Other Stories, comprised of Diaboliad, No. 13–The Elpit Workers’ Commune, A Chinese Tale, and The Adventures of Chichikov, serves as an excellent introduction to this renowned Russian satirist and playwright’s work. Black comedy, biting social and political commentary, and Bulgakov’s unique narrative exuberance combine to tell the tales of labyrinthine post-Revolution bureaucracy; clashes between science, the intellectual class, and the state; and the high price to be paid for the promised utopian world of Communism in early Soviet Russia. Bulgakov’s signature eloquent skewering of the various shortcomings of the world around and within him can be found on every page, and horror and magic interweave in a constant dance of the absurd—a dance that would reach its highest point both stylistically and thematically in Bulgakov’s tour de force novel The Master and Margarita. “One of the most original voices of the twentieth century.” —The Guardian, UK
A new edition of Bulgakov’s fantastical precursor to The Master and Margarita, part of Melville House’s reissue of the Bulgakov backlist in Michael Glenny’s celebrated translations. A key work of early modernism, this is the superbly comic story of a Soviet scientist and a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Attempting a medical first, the scientist transplants the glands of a petty criminal into the dog and, with that, turns a distinctly worryingly human animal loose on the city. The new, lecherous, vulgar, Engels-spouting Sharik soon finds his niche in govenrmental bureaucracy as the official in charge of purging the city of cats. A Frankenstein fable that’s as funny as it is terrifying, Heart of a Dog has also been read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution. It was rejected for publication by the censors in 1925, and circulated in samizdat for years until Michael Glenny translated it into English in 1968—long before it was allowed to be officially published in the Soviet Union. That happened only in 1987, although till this day the book remains one of Mikhail Bulgakov’s most controversial novels in his native country.
A dark, fantastical satire of Communist utopianism by the author of The Master and Margarita. Lauded Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart (sometimes translated as The Heart of a Dog) is a zany, violent, and whimsical satire of the failures inherent in the dream of a Communist utopia, following dog-turned-human Sharik as he tries and fails utterly to live a life of goodness and virtue—but goodness and virtue as defined by whom? Both a nod to the Frankenstein myth and a vicious critique of the Soviet government’s attempts to reshape and redefine personhood during and after the Russian Revolution, A Dog’s Heart was rejected for publication by censors in 1925, but was circulated via samizdat—the clandestine production and distribution of literature that had been banned by the state—for years until it was translated into English in 1968. To this day, the book remains one of Bulgakov’s most highly regarded works.
When Soviet censors approved Mikhail Bulgakov's stage adaptation of Don Quixote, they were unaware that they were sanctioning a subtle but powerful criticism of Stalinist rule. The author whose novel The Master and Margarita would eventually bring him world renown achieved this sleight of hand through a deft interpretation of Cervantes's knight. Bulgakov's Don Quixote fits comfortably into the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of idealistic, troubled intellectuals, but Quixote's quest becomes an allegory of the artist under the strictures of Stalin's regime. Bulgakov did not live to see the play performed: it went into production in 1940, only months after his death. The volume's introduction provides background for Bulgakov's adaptation and compares Bulgakov with Cervantes and the twentieth-century Russian work with the seventeenth-century Spanish work. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) grew up and was educated in Kiev. He practiced medicine but soon turned to journalism and writing. He struggled persistently for artistic freedom but was frustrated by the Soviet censorship. "In the last seven years," he wrote to a friend in 1937, "I have created sixteen works in various genres, and they have all been slain." Translation The original Russian text of this work is available in a companion volume.
And now for something completely different... Bulgakov's Feuilleton presents 101 feuilletons (short stories) written by ultra famous Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov between November 1919 and March 1926. These stories were published in newspapers and magazines, under his own name and pennames such as Ol 'Wright, F.S-ov, M. Bull, Emma B., and G.P. Ukhov ("of the ear"). Only two of these feuilletons have been published previously in English translation. The period 1919-1926 is of historic interest, and Bulgakov's stories offers a unique perspective on it. Russia was recovering from the combined effects of WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War; and it was engaged in a massive experiment in social engineering under Communism. During this period, writers experienced increasing censorship and repression, which culminated in the purges of the 1930s. With the exception of his very first published work, the story "Future Prospects," Bulgakov paints in the small in his Feuilleton. He depicts ordinary people in ordinary settings who are struggling with problems of existence-hyperinflation, bureaucracy, corruption, travel delays, incomprehensible regulations, cronyism, nepotism, red-tapism, drunkenness, wife beating, the housing problem, education, pointless day-long meetings, and encounters with "the healthcare system." He draws hundreds upon hundreds of characters, with a psychological perspicacity that we in the West have come to expect of a Russian master. Bulgakov's short works stand in the same relationship to his major works as do the sketches of any great artist to his masterpieces. And in these stories the reader will find precursors of characters, settings, and plot elements found in the later The Heart of a Dog (1925) and The Master and Margarita (1940). Bulgakov is a brilliant writer. His Gogolian imagination and playwright's ear for dialogue are on abundant display in these stories. The action moves quickly. There are twists and turns. But always, a poetic ending.
THE ORIGINAL AND BEST TRANSLATION BY MICHAEL GLENNY 50th Anniversary Edition Afterwards, when it was frankly too late, descriptions were issued of the man- expensive grey suit, grey beret, one green eye and the other black. He arrives in Moscow one hot summer afternoon with various alarming accomplices, including a demonic, fast-talking black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order are in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught. Brilliant and blackly comic, The Master and Margarita was repressed by Stalin's authorities and only published after the author's death. The Vintage Classic Russians Series- Published for the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, these are must-have, beautifully designed editions of six epic masterpieces that have survived controversy, censorship and suppression to influence decades of thought and artistic expression.
The Russian playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) is now widely acknowledged as one of the giants of twentieth-century Soviet literature, ranking with such luminaries as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. In his own lifetime, however, a casualty of Stalinist repression, he was scarcely published at all, and his plays reached the stage only with huge difficulty. His greatest masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, a novel written in the 1930s in complete secrecy, largely at night, did not appear in print until more than a quarter of a century after his death. It has since become a worldwide bestseller.In Manuscripts Don't Burn, J.A.E. Curtis has collated the fruits of eleven years of research to produce a fascinating chronicle of Bulgakov's life, using a mass of exciting new material - much of which has never been published before. In particular, she is the only Westerner to have been granted access to either Bulgakov's or his wife Yelena Sergeyevna's diaries, which record in vivid detail the nightmarish precariousness of life during the Stalinist purges. J.A.E Curtis combines these diaries with extracts from letters to and from Bulgakov and with her own illuminating commentary to create a lively and highly readable account. Her vast collection of Bulgakov's correspondence is unparalleled even in the USSR, and she draws on it judiciously to include letters addressed directly to Stalin, in which Bulgakov's pleads to be allowed to emigrate; letters to his sisters and to his brother in Paris whom he did not see for twenty years; intimate notes to his second and third wives; and letters to and from well-known writers such as Gorky and Zamyatin.Manuscripts Don't Burn provides a forceful and compelling insight into the pressures of day-to-day existence for a man fighting persecution in order to make a career as a writer in Stalinist Russia.
In this collection of short stories, drawing heavily from the author's own experiences as a medical graduate on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov describes a young doctor's turbulent and often brutal introduction to his practice in the backward village of Muryovo. Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection contains some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress. This edition also includes the famous piece 'Morphine' by Bulgakov.
THE STORY: The action centers on the difficulties encountered by Professor Preobrajansky, an innovative medical practitioner who specializes in sexual rejuvenation (by organ implantation), in his running battle with the management committee of his
A new edition of Bulgakov's blistering satire about the great Russian director Stanislavski, inventor of "Method acting," part of Melville House's reissue of the Bulgakov backlist in Michael Glenny's celebrated translations. In 1926, a play based on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The White Guard premiered at the prestigious Moscow Arts Theatre and it was an immediate and long-lasting success that laid the ground for the rest of Bulgakov's career as a playwright and novelist. But it was not an entirely positive experience, and this novel, written near the end of Bulgakov's life, skewers the theatrical fraternity he had been a part of for many years, and the Stalinist system of censorship that suppressed his work. Black Snow is the story of Maxudov, a young playwright whose play is chosen, almost at random, to be performed by the legendary Independent Theatre, and the chaos that ensues. The two co-directors of the theater, modeled after Stanislavski and his co-director, battle to control the production, star actresses throw daily fits, and with each rehearsal the chances of the play ever being ready to perform recedes. The ultimate backstage novel and a brilliant satire from one of the greatest modern Russian writers.
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