Old Nick and the Magician of Moscow
Mikhail Bulgakov and the Re-enchantment of Literature
A Tragic Comedian
Bulgakov was born into a Russian middle class family in Kiev in 1891. Having studied medicine at the University of Kiev, he worked as a provincial GP and—after being forcibly mobilised by the Ukrainian Nationalist Army—served in field hospitals during the civil war. In 1919 he abandoned medicine for journalism, beginning to write short stories and plays for local theatres. Convinced that a brilliant literary career lay ahead of him, Bulgakov moved to Moscow in 1921 and began to establish a reputation as a versatile, amusing and powerful writer for page and stage.
By the late 1920s Bulgakov had gained a wide readership for several published collections of short stories and established an enthusiastic audience for his plays: in 1928 he had three simultaneously in production at separate Moscow theatres. All three were banned the following year. So were his first two novels. He had begun to experience the systematic and vindictive mauling at the hands of the critical establishment that was to dog the rest of his career.
This was the era of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans—when a period of creative freedom, associated with the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s, was extinguished by strict and coercive state control of the arts. Literary affairs came under the hand of Leopold Averbakh, the dogmatic Stalinist head of RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. And Bulgakov—a writer who chronicled the foibles and faults of his society—was learning that the approval of official critics like Averbakh far outweighed the enthusiasm of readers and audiences in determining a writer’s ability to work and survive.
Bulgakov abandoned his career as a doctor, but never relinquished his interest in advances in science and medicine and the social, political and literary possibilities they brought. These themes informed a number of his acerbic fictional critiques of post-revolutionary Russia.
One of his earliest collections of short pieces, Diaboliad, included literary parody, satire, science fiction and surrealism. Its best-known tale, The Fatal Eggs, is a caustic allegory of the revolution in which a biomedical-engineering experiment by ardent Bolsheviks results in the generation of a set of enormous monsters. Bulgakov was, of course, labelled a “neo-bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary” by the literary press—but at least his book was published.
His 1925 novella Heart of a Dog fared less well. Another political parable, it offers a much more cleverly constructed critique of Russian society than The Fatal Eggs: it’s ironic as well as allegorical, more shrewdly humorous and contains a richer blend of disparate elements—horror, satire, farce and science-fiction. It tells the story of a Moscow professor who transplants a human pituitary gland and testicles into a stray dog with fascinating and alarming results. The book’s science-fiction elements echo both Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein—and the post-operative transformation of the dog prefigures the final image of Animal Farm. A complex and fascinating novella, but not to the taste of the censors and Bulgakov’s enemies in RAPP, the book was banned and remained unpublished until 1987, the era of Gorbachev and Glasnost, sixty-two years after it was written and 47 years after the death of its author.
Bulgakov’s taste for mixing satirical and fantastic elements was also evident in theatrical work like Adam and Eve (1931) and Bliss (1934). Ivan Vasilievich (1935)—treated to an entertaining revival by the Company of Clerks at Battersea Arts Centre ten years ago—is the story of an inventor who uses time travel to escape political persecution and ends up bringing Ivan the Terrible to the Moscow of the 1930s.
These satirical fantasies are packed with knockabout comedy and farce—but they have a dark side: from The Fatal Eggs to Ivan Vasilievich, Bulgakov’s main themes are mourning and erasure. These tales are laments for the loss of spiritual and creative freedom in Stalin’s Russia.
The other important thread in Bulgakov’s work is his directly biographical material, drawing on his experiences as a provincial medic and his childhood in a wealthy monarchist family in Kiev. A Country Doctor’s Notebook (1925-7) is a cycle of short stories about an overworked young doctor in a rural hospital. Like William Carlos Williams’ stories of medical life, they concern the struggle between knowledge and ignorance, and present a positive view of the notion of scientific and medical progress.
