A personage no other than Stalin counted himself an admirer—he attended one of Bulgakov’s plays fifteen times. And when the art commissars started in on Bulgakov’s work for its nuanced perspective on his vanishing class—of the 301 reviews that Bulgakov, as thin-skinned as the cliché about writers has it, had counted by 1930, 298 were negative—it was Stalin himself who interceded on the writer’s behalf.
