Is Comrade Bulgakov Dead?: Mikhail Bulgakov at the Moscow Art Theatre

by Anatoly Smeliansky, Arch Tait (Translator)

This is a book about a power which tried to destroy all that was alive in Russian culture. It is a book about a great Russian theatre seduced by the Stalin regime. It is a book, too, about one man who tried under conditions of absolute unfreedom to retain his own identity and soul - Mikhail Bulgakov. Mikhail Bulgakov was a doctor in Kiev when he became fatally attracted to the theatre. He moved to Moscow and began a career as a novelist and playwright. His first major play, known here as The White Guard, was taken up by the eminence grise of Russian theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theatre. Championed by Stalin, the production won immense acclaim but subsequent plays fell foul of the censor. Bulgakov fought to save his work, becoming the focus of the ferocious debates raging within the writers' union and the theatre itself. In this fascinating analysis of the relationship between an author, his theatre and the Soviet State, Anatoly Smeliansky has drawn on his unique access to the Moscow Art Theatre archives to unearth the truth behind Black Snow, Bulgakov's bitter satire on the theatre and its greatest hero Konstantin Stanislavsky, his novel The Master and Margarita and Batum, the anti-Stalin play which, at the height of the terrors he dared to send to the dictator for his sixtieth birthday.

374 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1993