Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov , 1891-1940, Russian novelist and playwright. He wrote satirical stories ( The Deviliad, 1925, tr. 1972) and comedies ( Zoe's Apartment, 1926) and the long novel The White Guard (1925, tr. 1971), in which a Kievan family hostile to the revolution is sympathetically and realistically portrayed. He condensed and dramatized this as The Days of the Turbines (1926, tr. 1934). The satirical and philosophical novel The Master and Margarita (tr. 1967, 1995) is considered his most important book; it was not published until a censored edition appeared in 1967 (other versions were published in 1973 and 1989). He worked intermittently on this fantasy, which concerns Satan's visit to Moscow, from 1928 until his death. His other novels include The Heart of a Dog (1925, tr. 1968). Bulgakov was officially criticized for several of his works.

Bibliography: See The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov: 1926-1936 (tr. 1972); study by A. C. Wright (1978).

Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanaseyev (1891–1940), Soviet dramatist, whose first play was a dramatization of his own novel The White Guard, dealing with the Civil War in the Ukraine in 1918. As The Days of the Turbins it was produced by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926. A second play on the same subject, The Flight, was not staged, while two later plays, a comedy entitled The Red Island (1928) and The Cabal of Saintly Hypocrites (1936), which dealt with Molière's difficulties with the censorship over Tartuffe, were seen only briefly. Bulgakov joined the staff of the Moscow Art Theatre, preparing for the company an excellent dramatization of Gogol's Dead Souls (1930). His last play, based on Cervantes' Don Quixote, was produced posthumously in 1941. The White Guard, directed by Michel Saint-Denis, was seen in London in 1938 and revived in 1979 by the RSC; as The Days of the Turbins it was produced in New York in 1977. An adaptation of The Cabal of Saintly Hypocrites as Molière in Spite of Himself was staged in New York in 1978. Adaptations of his novel The Master and Margarita were staged at the Taganka Theatre, by Lyubimov, in 1977 and in New York in 1978.