The Russian playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) is now widely acknowledged as one of the giants of twentieth-century Soviet literature, ranking with such luminaries as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. In his own lifetime, however, a casualty of Stalinist repression, he was scarcely published at all, and his plays reached the stage only with huge difficulty. His greatest masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, a novel written in the 1930s in complete secrecy, largely at night, did not appear in print until more than a quarter of a century after his death. It has since become a worldwide bestseller.
In Manuscripts Don't Burn, J.A.E. Curtis has collated the fruits of eleven years of research to produce a fascinating chronicle of Bulgakov's life, using a mass of exciting new material - much of which has never been published before. In particular, she is the only Westerner to have been granted access to either Bulgakov's or his wife Yelena Sergeyevna's diaries, which record in vivid detail the nightmarish precariousness of life during the Stalinist purges. J.A.E Curtis combines these diaries with extracts from letters to and from Bulgakov and with her own illuminating commentary to create a lively and highly readable account. Her vast collection of Bulgakov's correspondence is unparalleled even in the USSR, and she draws on it judiciously to include letters addressed directly to Stalin, in which Bulgakov's pleads to be allowed to emigrate; letters to his sisters and to his brother in Paris whom he did not see for twenty years; intimate notes to his second and third wives; and letters to and from well-known writers such as Gorky and Zamyatin.
Manuscripts Don't Burn provides a forceful and compelling insight into the pressures of day-to-day existence for a man fighting persecution in order to make a career as a writer in Stalinist Russia.
Mikhail Bulgakov is (in my opinion) the greatest satirist of the soviet era. Like most satirists, his genius was missed by so many people and he had a very difficult life. Trying to make it as a writer while all his works kept getting banned lead him to want to be expelled from the Soviet Union, he even wrote letters to many members of the party, including Stalin. A phone call from Stalin, he was asked if he wanted to leave the USSR. I believed he declined out of fear of the consequences, but this did make his life a little easier; getting a job with the Moscow Art Theatre.
While a biography or an autobiography (one exists I believe) would have been better, this collection of letters and diary entries did give a great insight into this man's life. Everything seems to lead up to Bulgakov writing the great Soviet novel. Worth checking out if you are a fan.
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