unbending could not figure out how, they would be broken. But Bulgakov’s great fortune was that, for some reason, he was allowed to live, though relatively little of his work reached the public, a death of a different kind. (‘I ask that it be taken into account’, Bulgakov wrote in a draft of the letter to Stalin, ‘that for me not being allowed to write is tantamount to being buried alive.’) The dictator called several weeks later. ‘What—have you gotten very tired of us?’ he asked the playwright, a rhetorical question if ever there were one. He offered Bulgakov a job in a Moscow theater so
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