Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times

By Marietta Chudakova

Marietta Chudakova is an expert on Soviet literature and on the works of Mikhail Bulgakov in particular. Her biography of Bulgakov was first published in 1988 and remains the most authoritative and comprehensive study of the writer’s life ever produced. It has received acclaim for the journalistic style in which it is written: the author draws on unpublished manuscripts and early drafts of Bulgakov’s novels to bring the writer to life. She also explores archive documents and memoirs written by some of Bulgakov’s contemporaries so as to construct a comprehensive and nuanced portrait of the writer and his life and times.

Marietta Chudakova casts light on Bulgakov’s life with an unrivalled eye for detail and a huge amount of affection for the writer and his works.

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times will be of particular interest to international researchers studying Mikhail Bulgakov’s life and works, and is recommended to a broader audience worldwide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glagoslav Publications
• Release date: Aug 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781784379827

Book preview

purchaser.

Introduction

Marietta Chudakova and Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times

In order to understand the huge importance that this biographical study of Mikhail Bulgakov written by Marietta Chudakova had when it was first published in 1988, we need to remind ourselves of the difficulties which faced literary scholars and other intellectuals in the late Soviet period. Since the death of Stalin in 1953 the USSR had gone through a period of cultural ‘Thaw’, a period when it had become possible to denounce Stalin (in official circles, but only behind closed doors) for his crimes against members of the Communist Party, but not to spell out in full the extent of the criminal horrors perpetrated against the Soviet people as a whole during the Terror. The Thaw period initiated by Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, which revealed Stalin’s actions to the XXth Party Congress in 1956, was only ever a partial thaw. True, in 1962 the sensational publication of Solzhenitsyn’s short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had for the first time lifted the veil of silence which had up until that moment concealed the history of the Gulag from public view. But this brief glimpse of life in Siberian labour camps did not signal the opening of floodgates, and it was not followed by a rush of other such publications. On the contrary, literary censorship seemed to regroup and reassert itself, and further controversial works by Solzhenitsyn and others failed to be granted permission to be published.

This largely repressive regime continued under Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, who from 1964 onwards came to preside over what is now known as the ‘era of stagnation’, when Soviet Communism became more and more bureaucratic at home, while its foreign policy came to be defined by the aggressive and wary attitudes of the Cold War. As often as a relatively outspoken or liberal work of literature was published, so equally often were intellectuals harassed or put on trial for spurious offences: and so the dissident movement was born, with liberally-inclined intellectuals banding loosely together to outwit the authorities where possible, often with the connivance - or at least the tacit encouragement - of westerners interested in Soviet culture.

One such figure on the literary scene was Marietta Chudakova, who joined the staff of the Manuscript Department of the Lenin Library (now known as the Russian State Library) in 1965, after completing her literary studies at doctoral level at university. Not long after this the Library acquired a sizeable archive from Yelena Sergeyevna Bulgakova, the third wife of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov. After a career which had sparkled into celebrity in the mid-1920s, when he had been the most controversial and sought-after playwright in the early years of the Soviet régime, Bulgakov had suffered increasing defeats as he attempted to publish or stage further works. By the time he died of a hereditary disease of the kidneys in 1940, at the early age of 48, he had become entirely frustrated in his literary endeavours. He had also come under the close and personal scrutiny of Stalin and other members of the Politbiuro, who on several occasions discussed whether to permit his works, but regularly concluded that they were too subversive. Bulgakov was perhaps lucky to escape the physical torments of the Terror, but his reputation as an essentially anti-Soviet figure remained after his death. Through the years of World War II in Soviet Russia (1941-45), and until well after Stalin’s death, he was virtually written out of literary history, and there could be no question of publishing his many unpublished works. Yelena Sergeyevna, like other ‘literary widows’ in the USSR, devoted herself to the courageous and difficult task of gathering his papers and manuscripts together and preserving them discreetly, in the hope that his works might eventually see the light of day.

This situation began to change, however, with the Thaw. By the mid-1960s – a quarter of a century after the author’s death - a number of his works, including several of his plays, had at last been published. The next most exciting event of the Thaw after the 1962 publication of Solzhenitsyn was the publication – for the time being only in part – of two portions of Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita by the journal Moskva, in late 1966 and early 1967. It would take until 1973, however, three years after Yelena Bulgakova’s own death, for the novel to be published in full, in a volume also containing his earlier novel The White Guard and his unfinished Theatrical Novel. This was the literary sensation of the decade, which launched the cult following of Mikhail Bulgakov and his works which has persisted to this day, very belatedly turning him into Russia’s most popular writer of the twentieth century.

Marietta Chudakova’s task, after the acquisition of the archive around the time of the Moskva publication, was to sort and catalogue the manuscripts, letters and papers in the archive. This was an enormous responsibility, which she undertook with passion and ferocious dedication. It involved her in unceasing investigation, over many years, of the context of these documents, to establish the biographical facts which lay behind the events alluded to, and to trace the writing history of Bulgakov’s entire oeuvre. She not only applied to the task her own extraordinary erudition and knowledge of the literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, but she also undertook numerous trips to interview surviving members of Bulgakov’s family, contemporaries of his dating back to Bulgakov’s schooldays in Kiev in the 1890s and the early part of the twentieth century, and literary figures who had known him personally. She also got to know all three of Bulgakov’s wives, eliciting from them candid and illuminating stories of their lives with this brilliant - but not always easy - man.

Chudakova’s task as an archivist in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to write up her investigations in scholarly form, as a description of the archive’s contents according to the exacting library conventions of the day. Strictly speaking, she was not meant to stray into biographical narrative, or to offer any evaluative commentary on the works. But with a writer of this calibre the norm would have been to make appropriate references to already published biographies or interpretative studies, whereas in this case none had yet been written, so there was nothing else for her to refer to. And so she found herself essentially writing his biography as she went along, compiling as she did so an astonishing resource for herself in the shape of an exhaustive chronology of his life. Some moments remained unexplained for the moment, however. As she once reported it, she was obliged in this extremely lengthy article about his archive, published in 1976, to state simply that in 1920 Bulgakov had lived in the town of Vladikavkaz, in the northern Caucasus. Neither Bulgakov’s sister Nadya nor any of his three wives was prepared to tell her what he was doing there, for fear of the possible repercussions even several decades later; for, as it subsequently emerged, Bulgakov had gone there with the White Army to serve as a medical officer during their retreat from the advancing Bolsheviks. And so Chudakova genuinely didn’t know the answer to this question at that point. She also spoke very entertainingly about how long it took her even to get the 1976 article past the censors. For example, she needed to allude to the presence in the archive of the manuscript of Bulgakov’s wonderful satirical tale The Heart of a Dog, but that text had not yet been licensed for publication in the USSR (it had appeared in the West in 1968), and so she was not allowed to mention its title. In the kind of discreet game-playing so characteristic of the courageous scholarship of Soviet academics at that time, she simply decided to smuggle a description of this archival item into her article by inconspicuously starting to talk about it as ‘Bulgakov’s third tale’ - and although on this occasion the censor did notice what she had been up to, he eventually conceded that this reference could stay in. The same schizophrenic attitudes were apparent when it came to providing specific references to catalogue numbers of the archive: Chudakova and others went to enormous lengths in a series of publications during those difficult years to smuggle in occasional specific mentions to catalogue references, so that other scholars could have some hope of tracking down the relevant item.

It was my privilege to benefit from this kind of generosity on the part of Chudakova and other Bulgakov scholars when I made two 4-month visits to the USSR in 1979 and 1980, as a very green postgraduate student who had seized upon the subject of the newly-rediscovered Mikhail Bulgakov as an ideal topic for the D.Phil. dissertation I was working on at Oxford University. My visit, like those of other British postgraduates in those years, was arranged under the terms of a cultural exchange agreement between the British and Soviet governments. British students, who had a tendency to want to pry into controversial subjects, were not entirely welcome, but had to be tolerated if the Soviet side was to be able to send its own students abroad. And so we were allowed to go there, and even to go to archives in some cases (though it took a full 13 years before I was finally allowed to use the Bulgakov archive in the Lenin Library). If you did get into an archive building, it turned out that there were various unwritten rules. First amongst these was that foreigners could not be granted access to catalogues. This meant that if you were to have any hope of doing any useful work, you had to be absolutely thoroughly prepared: you needed to have read every available publication on your subject, and thanks to the ingenuity of scholars like Chudakova, you could assemble a few crumbs of information from these, on which to base your archival requests. Another hindrance placed in our way by the Soviet authorities could emerge as you were leaving the country: there were several instances of western postgraduates having all their research materials simply confiscated at the border. This threat was alleviated by the staff of the Cultural Section at the British Embassy, who looked after us during our stay: they allowed us very kindly (and quite illegally) to use the diplomatic bag, and towards the end of our stay we were allowed to go along and stuff up to 2kg of papers and microfilms into a plastic carrier bag. After our return we then had to go along to King Charles Street in London, to the Foreign Office, to collect our research materials and take them back to our universities. Many Soviet scholars went out of their way to talk to us, entertained us in the evenings to meals and much vodka, educated us so that we should have a reasonable understanding of the world we were trying to describe, and on many occasions lent us their own notes taken from archives, or extracts from the catalogue, to try to fill the gaps with which we were struggling thanks to the Soviet authorities’ obstructiveness. When I did finally complete my doctorate on Bulgakov in 1982, a significant proportion of the footnotes containing archival references had to be faked; and my examiners agreed that this was of course the only honourable option, given that spelling out just where I had got my information from could have compromised colleagues back in the Soviet Union, and caused them much unpleasantness.

It was with some trepidation that I approached Marietta Chudakova, as the leading expert on Bulgakov and someone who worked in the Lenin Library Manuscript Department (which was adamantly refusing to let me in), to ask her for a meeting. But in a pattern which was soon to become an established routine, she invited me home to her apartment, several floors up in a high-rise block of flats in a modern suburb of Moscow. I would be told at what time to arrive, usually mid-to-late evening, and I would turn up with a list of questions relevant to my topic, or arising from those materials I had been allowed to see in other archives. Marietta was a daunting person to meet, despite her small stature, and one always felt that her Tartar blood (her father, Omar Khan-Magomedov, was born in Dagestan) was what lent her a particular fierceness. She would fire questions at me or make scathing comments in her inimitable staccato delivery, straining my Russian to its limits. But over time, and as I prepared very conscientiously for each meeting, she came to treat me with great kindness, and was extraordinarily generous with explanations and materials. Nothing that I did subsequently, whether it was my doctorate (on the theme of the writer in Bulgakov’s works), no the later books I wrote about Bulgakov, would have taken the shape they did had it not been for her wonderful instinct for pedagogy, and her determination that if I was serious about Bulgakov then it was important that I should understand him properly. And the evenings would always end over tea and snacks at the table, and conversation with Marietta and her charming husband Alexander Chudakov, himself a wonderful Chekhov scholar who died tragically in 2005 after being mugged in the entrance to their apartment block.

Chudakova’s long devotion to the cause of Bulgakov (she is the author of numerous important studies of other early Soviet authors as well) was reflected in a whole series of articles which she published about him. But the culmination of her efforts came in 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ made it possible at last to publish long-banned texts in the USSR (many of which had been published earlier in Western émigré editions). At the same time, it became possible for important critical and biographical publications to appear. The present volume, Chudakova’s Zhizneopisaniye Mikhaila Bulgakova (literally: Description of the Life of Mikhail Bulgakov), was first published in a 495-page edition, with a print-run of 50,000 copies. But things were moving so fast in those years, and the limitations on what it was permissible to say in public were shifting so swiftly, that in the very same year she published a second, extended edition of 671 pages, with a print run of 90,000 copies. This later edition included some rather more controversial material, such as evidence of a love-affair Bulgakov had had with a woman called Margarita, and the investigation of suggestions that Bulgakov’s third wife Yelena had had close links to the NKVD (precursor of the KGB). She is also able to be less euphemistic about events such as the arrest of the poet Osip Mandelstam in 1934. It was certainly the first full biography of Bulgakov in Russian, although A. Colin Wright had in fact already published a biography in English, his Mikhail Bulgakov. Life and Interpretations, in Toronto in 1978.

When we pick up this book now, we can still admire the extraordinary range of knowledge and depth of investigation that it displays. Chudakova uses testimonials from contemporaries to provide us with the authentic flavour of the period, whether in relation to Bulgakov’s schooling or to the circles of friends he began to move in when he became established in Moscow. Underpinning the writing is an extraordinarily detailed chronicle of his life, all assembled by hand on notes taken long before the advent of computers. The very title of the work is redolent of the pure chronicler’s task, even though the work also succeeds in all the usual range of biographical goals: in capturing the writer’s everyday life, his loves, and his professional tribulations, as well as the origins and gradual evolution of his literary works. It is a challenging read: it comes without an index, despite its length and the huge range of its subjects, and it demands the unwavering attention of the reader, as well as unquestioned devotion to the subject, to Bulgakov himself. If I look back at my 1988 edition, with its faded print on musty, yellowing pages, I remain enormously impressed by the extraordinary energy that went into its writing. This is even reflected in the way the words are crammed on to the page, 50 lines of text per page in a font size which doesn’t make for entirely comfortable reading. Since 1988 there have been new publications of documents relating to Bulgakov’s life, filling in details about his family and their lives, but also providing us with much more information about the literary policy of the Stalin régime, together with transcriptions of discussions at Politbiuro level which determined the very fate of writers and their works. Nothing can quite compare with Chudakova’s study of Bulgakov, however, immersed directly as it is in the lives of people who knew Bulgakov, and produced from within the Soviet system which shaped his life. It is still both awe-inspiring and instructive to revisit one of the great monuments of Soviet-era scholarship, written in defiance of the censors, and championing one of the great free spirits of Russia in the twentieth century.

---

Professor J.A.E. Curtis,

Oxford

Preface

It was only in the mid-1960s, when the majority of Bulgakov’s plays were published and a one-volume edition containing a considerable amount of his prose was released, that the author’s name, which had been well-known prior to that chiefly among literary historians and those who had seen the play The Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh), first began to appeal to an extremely broad readership in Russia. In late 1966 and early 1967, when his last novel, The Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita), was published and subsequently translated into numerous languages, Bulgakov’s creative oeuvre achieved worldwide recognition, altering to a degree the perceived wisdom about Russian prose of the 1930s.

When the novel was published for the first time, the writer’s widow, Y.S. Bulgakova, acquired from the state an archive of Bulgakov’s writings, which she looked after for a quarter of a century after her husband’s death, and happenstance dictated that it befell the author of this biography to sort through these archived documents and conduct a scientific study of them. The writer’s creative output was revealed at that point in all its hitherto unknown glory, and in the process of sorting through and describing the manuscripts and other documents, many biographical and literary details came into circulation in the cultural sphere for the first time.

Of considerable importance in gaining an understanding of the writer’s personality and biography were the conversations I had with Yelena Sergeyevna Bulgakova during my numerous meetings with her at her apartment in Moscow, in Suvorovsky Bulvar – a place considered to have great significance as a monument by students and admirers of Bulgakov’s life and work.

As I strove to add to these archives and gain more of an insight into his biography, my knowledge of which contained gaping holes at the time, I attempted to track down his relatives and friends, gradually expanding the scope of my search. Thus it was that I ended up with hundreds of pages of notes from my conversations with the writer’s contemporaries and those who had borne witness to his life and times.

Naturally, the recollections of his contemporaries, recorded during the chats we had, can often be rendered more complex by additional factors which, whether wittingly or unwittingly, distort information, including, for example, a degree of caution when expressing religious beliefs or other convictions, or when shedding light on certain events and how these events were perceived. This circumspection – so typical of older generations of Russians, and so easy to understand (yet no less sad because of that), even with regard to their views from a bygone era, which have changed as they have grown older – had an effect on how Bulgakov’s character was portrayed in the book. Every single brush-stroke, moreover, in the portrait of a man as remarkable as our protagonist seems important: after all, only the sum total of these brush-strokes – living and breathing, in motion, and changing during the course of his life, with some qualities exaggerated and others suppressed – will enable me to provide a fully-rounded sense of the identity of the man who wrote The Master and Margarita. In so doing, I shall be following in the footsteps of a man who, back in the mid-19th century, devised a new approach to writing biographies that was ahead of its time then and is still a relevant and fruitful method today: Pavel Vasilievich Annenkov (an admirer of Bulgakov’s work), who remains unsurpassed to this day as the best biographer not only of Pushkin but also of Gogol, Belinsky, Turgenev – of all those, indeed, about whom he left memoirs. First and foremost, the author would appreciate it if the system whereby each and every detail of a person’s life is given a separate explanation and a separate justification could be rejected permanently, he wrote, and also the system of mourning and repentance for the protagonist to which the author resorts when, despite all his best efforts, he can no longer find the words with which to explain or justify certain phenomena. In other words, Annenkov warned against seeking to explain and justify certain actions and qualities in isolation, calling instead for the starting point to be the holistic nature of the creator and his creative output, and not replacing this with an attempt to understand and portray a highly nuanced individual through a simple calculation of the extent to which this individual adhered to established ideas about proper and acceptable standards of behaviour, and the extent to which he departed from them. When this task is undertaken, it often happens that the author perceives a discrepancy between the norm and their subject when in fact there isn’t one at all, and on occasion the author tries to make his protagonist fit into the rule without any need to do so at all, merely because of the false notion that it is better for the protagonist to be given a place of honour than to be left in a vast, free place [my italics – M.C.]. I tried, at any rate, not to make our hero fit into the rule, but to understand, as far as possible, his living and breathing identity".

In this book I have drawn extensively on the unpublished memoirs, written down by me, of the writer’s widow, Y.S. Bulgakova (1893-1970), his first wife Tatiana Nikolayevna Kiselgof (1889-1982), his sister Nadezhda Afanasievna Zemskaya (née Bulgakova; 1893-1971), his cousin Alexandra Andreyevna Tkachenko, and also material from numerous conversations with friends and acquaintances of the writer, from his schooldays to the final days of his life. Many facts about Bulgakov’s life and creative oeuvre are being revealed here for the first time. It goes without saying that in the making of this biography, works by Soviet researchers and researchers from other countries were important and of use: over the course of twenty years, a sizeable number of such works have been consulted.

It is worth noting that this book is about a man who barely left any direct statements about subjects that are important to any biographer – from political ones to religious ones. Though he is not unique in this, it is nonetheless a fairly rare thing; it is something I would like my readers to bear in mind. For anything that would usually be referred to as a person’s views, the biographer of Bulgakov is required to reconstruct these things on the basis of indirect evidence alone. In this regard, material related to his childhood and young manhood – the time when his personality was shaped – is particularly valuable. Even the most indirect evidence was important here – such as Yekaterina Petrovna Kudryavtseva’s recollections of her father, Pyotr Pavlovich Kudryavtsev, which were sent to me in 1977; Kudryavtsev had taken charge of the history of philosophy department at the Kiev Spiritual Academy in 1897. She wrote in her letter that the memoirs didn’t even contain a single mention of the writer or his parents, but added, quite rightly, that what she had described in them was not so much the everyday life of the professorship in those days (and the author grew up in the family of a professor from the Spiritual Academy, no less), as – first and foremost – the cultural, intellectual and moral situation which enabled, to the extent that is now known to us, the formation of his ‘inner’ identity. After all, Bulgakov was not only a great artist, but a writer of rare breadth, an ‘emancipator of thought’, if you will, and after all, all of this takes shape in a person – either consciously or unconsciously – during their childhood.

It has always seemed to me that anyone studying literature and society in our times must try to break through to the true picture, regardless of the pluses and minuses that are imposed retroactively, and that it is only by doing so that a biographer can express the tribute of his respect for a great writer, over whose life he takes it upon himself to think and ponder, then decides to share the results of this thought process with the reader.

Bulgakov loomed up before his readers a quarter of a century after his death, in the mid-sixties. He became part of the national culture at a time when society was on the crest of a wave, though this wave was already being transformed into some sort of convulsive spasm in those years; hence the sense of convulsion in the levels of knowledge about his biography and creative oeuvre back then, which can still be felt today. Bulgakov appeared to many to be a much coveted and long sought-after template, an object of faith and veneration. Various strata within society ascribed their own values to him, and it was these values – in his image – that they were really venerating.

Society needed a legend – and duly acquired or perhaps created one. The fact that there was no biography available – not even a first draft of one – and the properties of the works themselves, which were being read for the first time – the autobiographical nature of A Theatrical Novel (Teatral’nyy Roman), the space for direct and indirect biographical identification revealed by the author in his novel The Master and Margarita – were the things that prompted this to happen.

Ready-made evaluations came in from various sides. Over and above any faith or veneration by this time, and strictly for pragmatic reasons, they were formed and imposed upon people by the official institutions, among others, which were tasked with having a restraining influence: there was a need to pour cold water over the sentiment which was spreading like wildfire within society, the obvious preference for this new writer of the ’20s and ’30s, over those of his contemporaries whose authority had long been enshrined in law, with special efforts made to keep it going. People hastened to adopt Bulgakov posthumously, under the terms of a template or script that was already familiar to them; the story of his life was endowed with characteristics that could conveniently be put into circulation, and which bore little relation to the actual facts. Opposed to this in no small measure, in accordance with the structure of the social situation, was public opinion, including the literary and academic spheres. The writer’s biography, before it had even taken shape, was immediately deconstructed: it was adapted to suit the needs of the publication of his legacy, to which readers were only able to get closer by going through great difficulties. A utilitarian approach to biographical fact took precedence. The words written about the writer took on the significance of some sort of lever, with the help of which certain matters which were only indirectly related to his life were set in motion.

This tendency in society to jump to conclusions about the writer’s life and personality creates certain difficulties for his biographer even today. Those who read Bulgakov and love his work have grown accustomed not only to the notions about him that have gone into legend, but also to the indirect, ambiguous method of setting out the details of his life – entirely in keeping, incidentally, with the allusion-based method of storytelling about Russian history that has taken shape over the last quarter of a century. I therefore deem it necessary and, at the same time, possible for me to warn those reading this book that they should not look for any allusions in it, should not try to read between the lines. The author of this book has attempted to express in direct terms what she wanted to say to her reader.

The same goes for the testimony given by contemporaries about particular character traits or convictions that the writer had at various stages of his life – regardless of whether or not they appeal to the author of this book or its readers – and indeed to everything else in it. Wherever it was not possible to achieve the clarity required to make confident assertions about the writer’s attitude to particular problems, this lack of clarity was left in place, rather than being artificially removed by the biographer.

There is no place in this book for invention, which carved out a large niche for itself in narratives about the writer’s life long ago. The author of this book is of the opinion that narratives in the intermediary genre, constructed along the same lines as The Lives of Remarkable People (Zhizn’ Zamechatel’nykh Lyudey), in a halfway-house between belles-lettres and science, have in no small measure exhausted their capabilities. I considered it necessary to construct this biography on facts alone, clearly setting out the boundary between fact and theory, and striving even then to avoid hiding from the reader how great or how little a basis there was for said boundary. One can’t get by without a little bit of guesswork of course, and one shouldn’t try to: what matters is to refrain from presenting pure speculation as something that has already been proven or is self-evident.

The hero of this book is a man who not only gave thought to his posthumous biography, but also talked about it with his friends and loved ones, pondered over it out loud, and even prepared it; a man who put a fair amount of thought into the relationship between myth, fiction and fact in the biographies of historical figures. Y.S. Bulgakova loved to repeat something he had once said, to the effect that myths are always created around each person of distinction, but that each of them had their own special myth, unlike any of the others. The existence of these legends is an essential part of our culture, and anyone who tried to get rid of them would end up looking absurd.

Anyone who sets about the task of writing a biography, however, is obliged to take steps to verify their sources, so as to separate the myth from the reality.

Over the last twenty years, we have all come to know Bulgakov’s biography far better than we did in the year in which his most important novel was published; but what do we know about his personality?

What sort of man was he? Fun-loving. Artistic. Brilliant. His day-to-day life, his home life, was not akin, in its outward characteristics, to the life of a strict ascetic who shuts himself off from the world – it was the inner meaning of this life that was ascetic.

As he fooled around and played games, he transposed elements of his everyday reality into the artistic worlds that he created. Following the lady into the room, with an unsteady gait and wearing a sailor’s cap, there came a young chap, seven years of age, with an extraordinarily supercilious physiognomy, which was smeared with soya chocolate… (from Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel). The family laughed at that: it was an accurate portrayal of Yelena Sergeyevna’s youngest son. The eldest, little Zhenya, felt offended, she told me during one of our meetings in November 1969, by the fact that Serezhka was in one of Mikhail Afanasievich’s books, and he wasn’t. ‘You know what, Zhenya, we could rectify that,’ Bulgakov replied in a serious voice, ‘but it’ll cost you! If I were to write, for example: As Margarita sat on the bench, she saw a young man walk past, and I write about you, then that’ll cost three roubles. If I write: a handsome young man walked past, then that’ll cost five roubles. And if I write: what a good-looking fellow! thought Margarita, then that will cost ten roubles!’

What sort of man was he? Withdrawn. Shut-off from other people. Intolerant of displays of familiarity. He placed a high value on the concept of maintaining a certain distance in all interaction, and knew how to do so himself. He opened up – and even then, it seems, not a massive amount – only to a small circle of extremely close friends.

… At times wary in life’s more trifling matters, and torn apart by contradictions, he did not lose, in serious things or in moments of crisis, his self-control or the vital forces with which he bristled, P.S. Popov wrote in a first draft – never published – of his biography of the writer. His sense of irony was unfailingly combined with a great deal of feeling, his witticisms hit the mark, and were at times waspish and trenchant, but they never jarred. It wasn’t that he despised people, he hated only human arrogance, narrowmindedness, monotony, humdrum mundane matters, careerism, insincerity and deceit, howsoever they were expressed: in actions, obsequiousness, words, even gestures. He was bold and unrelentingly direct in his views. As far as he was concerned, falsehoods could never become truth. He followed his chosen path courageously and selflessly.

The author of this book is deeply grateful to the loved ones, relatives, friends and contemporaries of Bulgakov to whom I spoke; it was only through my conversations with them that I was able, to some small extent at least, to get a sense of the personality of this man, who might have been one of our contemporaries, yet who, it appears, was never recorded on a single roll of film.

This personality could only emerge in the book (if indeed it has emerged) at the intersection between various pieces of information about it – and this is made clear in the way the narrative is structured.

The life and work – it is a phrase which seems to state a problem rather than offer a solution.

The author of this book opted instead to write a comprehensive biography – Bulgakov’s creative output is only mentioned to the extent that it proved possible to perceive it and trace its connections, manifested to a greater or lesser extent, to the facts of his biography.

Chapter One

The Kiev Years: the Family; Grammar School and University. The War. Medicine. Revolution.

1

Bulgakov’s mother and father both hailed from the Oryol Governorate. We were from a family of landowning clergymen, the writer’s sister, Nadezhda Afanasievna Zemskaya, recalled, our grandfathers on both sides were priests; one had had nine children, the other had had ten.

Their maternal grandfather, Mikhail Vasilievich Pokrovsky, the son of a deacon, was an archpriest, the abbot of a cathedral in the town of Karachev, in the Oryol Governorate. In a photograph taken in the 1880s, we see him turning a frank, open gaze to the camera. He has a youthful face, as does his wife Anfisa Ivanovna (née Turbina). In the photo she is seated, as is her husband, but even so one can see that she was an impressive woman, her hair tied back in a ponytail. All nine children are there in the photograph too: the eldest son Vasily, a student at the Military and Surgical Academy in St Petersburg, who died young; the eldest daughter Olga is seen standing, her arm on her brother’s shoulder; Ivan and Zakhar, who were of secondary school age, are there. Also there is a boy aged nine – this is Nikolai Mikhailovich Pokrovsky, who went on to achieve fame as a doctor in Moscow; Bulgakov was close to this uncle for many years and later made him the hero of one of his stories… And beside him is Mikhail, younger still – he too went on to become a doctor, and his face appears in plenty of photographs of the Bulgakov family in Kiev; and little Mitrofan, who became a statistician. The nanny is there, holding Alexandra, whose married name in later life was Barkhatova, and beside her is a twelve-year-old girl with a very serious look on her face: this is Bulgakov’s mother.

His paternal grandfather, Ivan Avraamovich Bulgakov, was a village priest for many years, and by the time his grandson Mikhail was born, he was the priest at the Sergiev Cemetery Church in Oryol. His wife, Olympiada Ferapontovna, became Mikhail Bulgakov’s godmother.

The writer’s father, Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, was born on 17th April, 1859, and initially studied at the Oryol Spiritual Seminary, then at the Kiev Spiritual Academy (1881-1885); he then spent two years teaching – he taught Greek at the Novocherkassk spiritual college. In the autumn of 1887 he became the dean of the Kiev Spiritual Academy, initially in the department of ancient civil history, then, just over a year later, in the department of the history and study of Western teachings; from 1890 to 1892 he also taught at the Institute for Noble Maidens, and in the fall of 1893 he took up a position as an independent censor in Kiev: he censored books written in French, English and German. In 1890, A.I. Bulgakov married a young teacher from the progymnasium in Karachev, Varvara Mikhailovna Pokrovskaya. On 3rd May, 1891, their first child was born. At his christening, which took place on 18th May at the Kiev-Podol Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross – you can still see the church today if, as you descend the hill leading to Podol, you turn off into Vozdvizhenskaya Street – he was given the name Mikhail, probably in honour of the protector of the city of Kiev, the archangel Mikhail. Evidence for this is provided by the fact that the Bulgakovs celebrated his name day not on one of the saints’ days nearer the start of May (such as May 7th (20th in the old style) – the birthday of Mikhail Ulumbysky), but on November 8th (21st in the old style), the day of the archangel Mikhail.

Mikhail did not have time to make his mark as an only child; instead, he immediately became an older brother: before he had turned three, he already had two sisters – Vera was born in 1892 and Nadezhda in 1893. In 1895, a third sister was born – Varya. Then, in October 1898, Nikolka appeared. And, in the year when Mikhail started attending pre-school classes (1900), Vanya was born.

That summer, his parents began building a dacha. Nadezhda Afanasievna Zemskaya told me a story passed down by her parents in 1969: When my parents got married, they were unsure for a long time what to do with mother’s dowry – whether to buy a house in Kiev (perhaps in Lukyanivka) or a dacha. In 1899 or 1900, two desyatinas of woodland were purchased – in Bucha, 29 versts from Kiev along the road leading to the South-West. They decided to build a house there – renting for a family that size was both expensive and difficult… In that first summer, in 1900, they travelled out to the dacha across Puscha-Vodytsia: they would get off at the last tram stop, then cover the rest of the ground on horseback or on foot. The following year, a railroad going in that direction was built; the next station after Bucha was Vorzel. The distance from the station to the dacha was about two versts… They built a single-storey house with 5 rooms, with a large store-room and two verandas. They had a lot of crockery, which they left there over the winter, opting not to take it back with them to the city. In the summer, the father of the household would arrive from the Academy, take off his tunic, put on a Russian-style caftan and a straw hat and go out to pull out stumps on the plot of land, which was marked out by a fence and an orchard – they only planted good varieties of apple trees, and plum trees; they did not plant many pear trees… There was a jetty on the lake, with a windmill beside it, and four Ukrainian brothers lived near them. They were millers. Their farmstead was duly known as Melniki (Millers); it was approximately one verst from Bucha. People used to go there to bathe – going on day-trips to the Millers’…

In Bulgakov’s memories of his childhood – those memories which go all the way down to the root of a person’s identity, and which are more than memories, and instead form some sort of indivisible nucleus of this identity – the roomy dacha in Bucha lived on, where they were never cramped, there was plenty of room for everyone, and where the prevailing atmosphere was one of familial and amicable unity and harmony; they also remembered the luxuriant Ukrainian forest, bathed in sunlight. (Might it not be on account of this that he was never able to love life at the dacha outside Moscow? The green spaces there probably seemed dusty by comparison, and all forms of housing felt cramped and unpleasant.)

On August 18th, 1900, the nine-year-old Mikhail was enrolled in the preparatory class at the Second grammar school; the singing teacher and choirmaster at this school was his father’s younger (by 14 years) brother, Sergei Ivanovich Bulgakov, the godfather of Mikhail’s younger brother Nikolai.

Eighty years later, in the fall of 1980, I had the good fortune of being able to get to know and chat to someone who was a fellow-pupil of Bulgakov’s, Yevgeny Borisovich Bukreyev. (A cardiologist who treated several generations of Kiev citizens, his name is well-known in the city, as is that of his father, a professor of mathematics named Boris Yakovlevich Bukreyev, who lived to the age of 104 and was still giving lectures at the university when he was a hundred years old.) Short in stature and dressed with an old-fashioned attention to detail, and with the serious facial expression of a practising doctor, Yevgeny Borisovich began the conversation in some doubt.

I don’t know how I can be of use to you. I wasn’t one of Bulgakov’s friends – neither at the First grammar school, nor at university. We studied in the same department, but he gave up medicine, as you know, the elderly doctor said, with a barely detectable hint of disapproval.

He practised for a while though…

Yes, he was a syphilologist, but I wasn’t interested in that at all. He and I didn’t have any contact with one another at all, either at university or later…

My interlocutor’s very manner of speaking was already restoring the link to that distant era, although he kept on repeating insistently: To convey the atmosphere of that bygone age is impossible, really.

The only year in which Bulgakov and Bukreyev were close was in the preparatory class at the Second grammar school. The elderly doctor’s memory of that time is a unique source, and as a result the merest trifles acquire a special value.

Did we make friends? Yes, we were acquaintances – we would get up to mischief together. He used to tease me: Bukreshka-tereshka-oreshka he would call me… for some reason that’s what he called me. He was an incredible tease, he came up with nicknames for everyone. In the preparatory class we had a teacher called Yaroslav Stepanovich, and we called him ‘Viroslav’ to his face. He had tuberculosis, that’s right: he was tall and thin, and used to cough a lot. At the time no-one thought anything of it – they let him teach at the school even though he had open tuberculosis. The drawing teacher was Boris Yakovlevich. We called him Barbos Yakovlevich. Anyone who had ugly handwriting or was bad at drawing he would call Maralo Maralovich…!

Thus, from out of the complete darkness in which that year, for us, is shrouded – the year in which little Misha Bulgakov, his backpack on his shoulders, ran off each morning to the Second grammar school (Did anyone take him to school? Did you ever see his family, or a servant? – No, I never saw them. We all walked to school on our own,), sounds of some kind start to make themselves heard, and particular phrases and little words gradually become discernable.

One of Bulgakov’s peers, Ilya Ehrenburg, who was also born in Kiev, but who spent his childhood in Moscow, only visiting Kiev occasionally, recalled of the city: There were some enormous gardens in Kiev, with chestnut trees growing in them; for a young boy from Moscow, they were as exotic as palm trees. For a little boy who had lived in Kiev ever since he was born, the chestnut trees were as familiar as poplar trees would have been to a boy from Moscow; for Bulgakov, one can only imagine, their absence in the cities in which he was required to live must have felt like an empty space.

There was the Chernukha stationer’s store on Khreshchatyk (they used to sell school exercise books there, with brilliant, colourful covers; in books like that, even tough math questions used to look more fun), and the Balabukha confectionery store, where you could get dried jam (there was some candy that looked like a rose in a box, it smelled of perfume). The people walking past in the streets would be smiling. In the summer-time, people used to sit outside the cafes on Kreshchatyk, Ehrenburg recalled, with their coffee or ice cream. The city looked like this right up until the outbreak of war, and perhaps even after it – it was described in very similar terms by Bulgakov’s first wife, Tatiana Nikolayevna, in one of the conversations we had: Kiev in those days was a happy city, with cafés outside in the streets, outdoor seating, with lots of people…

… Bulgakov would later recall the happy, contented faces of the people of Kiev in the first decade of the century; he never could get used to the frowning, beleaguered crowds of Moscow in the twenties and early thirties, and, as he started work on his play about the future, Bliss (Blazhenstvo), he wanted to convey this feeling, in some lines written down for the play’s heroine but not included in the final version of the text: … Your eyes reassure me. I am struck by the look on the faces of the people here. They seem so serene. Rodomanov. Did the people really have a different look on their faces back then? Maria. Oh, but of course. They are so radically different from your people… The look in their eyes is horrible.

On August 22nd, 1901, Mikhail Bulgakov was enrolled in the first year at the First grammar school, housed in a beautiful building on Bibikovsky Boulevard, later described in The White Guard (Belaya Gvardiya) (the building still looks exactly as it did then today). The young Bulgakov’s luck was in: as time passed, he was rewarded for the hard work he had put into his studies. As he looked back on this, Y.B. Bukreyev, who enrolled at the very same school in the same year, but in a different department (in today’s parlance it might be described as a parallel set), wrote to me on November 4th, 1980: Before I answer the questions you have put to me, allow me to paint a picture of some of the more general changes which took place in the life of a middle school in around 1900. In the nineties, the powers that be decided to make a host of changes in the Ministry of national enlightenment, and the man appointed as minister for this department was General Vannovsky, who proposed that the institutions responsible for education should act as a custodian and demonstrate a ‘tender’ attitude towards the schoolchildren, and also that they should increase the standard of education by recruiting teachers with better qualifications, such as university professors.

His memory of the 1900s was not letting him down. In the middle of the previous year, the minister of enlightenment, N.P. Bogolepov, had indeed died as a result of a wound inflicted on him on February 14th, 1901 by a student from Kiev named Karpovich. Bogolepov had brutally put down some student uprisings (shortly before he was assassinated, 183 Kiev students had been handed over to the soldiers).

Y.B. Bukreyev quite rightly recalled that in Kiev, the First grammar school was selected for this kind of experiment, and from 1900 onwards, professors from the Kiev polytechnic institute and university were invited to teach there. Natural science, for example (an entirely new subject which had never been taught before at a middle school) was taught by Professor Dobrovlyansky, who had taught at the Polytechnic Institute. G.I. Chelpanov taught psychology and logic in the seventh and eighth grades [Chelpanov had been head of the department of psychology and logic at Kiev University from 1902 to 1906, and later founded the Moscow Psychological Institute, of which he became the director. – M.C.]. His place was later taken by an associate professor from the university, Selikhanovich… Thus, the standard of teaching on offer was what one would expect to see at a university; it is hard to overstate just how significant this proved to be in the pupils’ later lives.

Bulgakov was in the second department and Bukreyev was in the first, hence they had different teachers, but the singing teacher and class supervisor was the same for both groups: Platon Grigorievich Kozhich. Kozhich, ‘Platosha’, was the choirmaster for the church choir, Bukreyev recalls; a very dear and respectable man… This man was at least the second choirmaster in young Misha’s life (if we include his uncle, Sergei Ivanovich). One can imagine how the young boy would have heard the word being spoken at home and oft repeated, before it came to be personified first in the one man, then in the other – so that eventually, many years later, there would emerge, moulding himself out of the greasy sultriness, the character who would say to Berlioz, at that fateful barrier: ‘This way, please! Straight ahead, sir. Any chance of a small tip for showing you the way? …I’m a church choirmaster out of work, you see…could do with a helping hand, sir…’ – and, bending double, the bizarre character pulled off his jockey cap with a sweeping gesture.

Let’s hear a little more from Yevgeny Bukreyev, though: "The Latin teacher was Suboch; we used to sing to him:

‘Vladimir Faddevich, Let’s have a drink, let’s have a drink!’

This was because he always used to say to us all: ‘Don’t you ever touch the stuff!’

After the revolution, when Latin became surplus to requirements, he quickly retrained and taught arithmetic.

At the grammar schools there was the institution of class supervisors. These were people who were fully grown but of limited intelligence. One of them – he was approaching sixty and had a head like an egg… he was called Lukyan or Lukyanovich, something like that – was a good bloke, as we used to say: he never gave us timed assignments and was generally very liberal in his attitude towards us. For some reason Misha called him the Stallion. The man in question was no doubt Yakov Pavlovich Lukianov, who served as class supervisor from 1876 to 1910 (and perhaps later as well!); in a photo of the school’s teaching staff taken in 1910, his head, like an egg" can be seen.

Thus, the corridors of the First High School start to fill up for us with characters who, though they are phantoms, are nonetheless to some extent visible (Selikhanovich spoke very badly, he had a lisp. He would always turn up for lessons wearing a crumpled, grubby tunic. His trousers were like bottles, and his hair was always tousled – carelessly combed…), and elements of high school folklore start to make themselves heard, piece by piece.

"The most unpleasant of the lot at the school was the bulldog Maksim. One of the year-groups invited him out for a stroll and shoved him into the Dnieper. From that point onwards, they used to tease him all the time: ‘Esteemed Maksim, how cold is it in the Dnieper?’ adding an obsequious ‘s’ after the last word – an old-fashioned way of showing respect in Russian. Maksim loved to add an ‘s’ after his words. Bulgakov loved doing so too: vinovat-s (sorry), blagodaryu-s (thank you) [As we shall see later, incidentally, Maksim was to play a noble role in the life of one of Bulgakov’s brothers… – M.C.]

There was also a Swiss named Vasily, of athletic build, like a real warrior. On public holidays he would stand at the door of the school dressed in blue woollen livery with gold trim, wearing a tricorn hat and holding a cane."

Twenty years later, the vast, four-storey building of the school will appear in The White Guard in a completely different period – the winter of 1918, and Aleksei Turbin, leaning over the banister, will see below him a little white-headed figure on tottering, sickly legs. "Turbin was gripped by an empty melancholy. Right then and there, beside the cold banister, a memory came back to him with exceptional clarity.

… A crowd of schoolchildren of all ages was rushing down this same corridor, gleefully. Stocky Maksim, the old bulldog, was hurriedly chivvying along two small figures dressed in black, at the head of the remarkable procession.

So be it, so be it, so be it, he was muttering, so be it, on the occasion of the joyful visit of Mr Trustee, Mr Inspector shall be able to take an admiring look at Mr Turbin and Mr Myshlayevsky. What a great pleasure this will be for him. What a truly wonderful pleasure, indeed!

One can only assume that those last words were uttered in a spirit of the bitterest sarcasm. Only to a man with perverse tastes could the contemplation of Messrs. Turbin and Myshlayevsky bring any degree of pleasure, particularly at such a joyful time as the visit of the school trustee.

Mr Myshlayevsky, who was tightly gripped in Maksim’s left hand, had a deep cut in his upper lip, and his left shirt-sleeve was hanging by a thread. Mr Turbin, whom Maksim was pulling along with his right hand, had lost his belt, and all of his buttons had come off, not only on his shirt but also on the fly of his pants, such that, in an utterly improper manner, Mr Turbin’s body and underpants were in full view for all to see.

Let us go, there’s a good chap Maksim, old thing, Turbin and Myshlayevsky begged him, turning their bruised and bloody faces towards him with looks that were designed to placate him.

Hooray! Drag him along the floor, the Venerable Max! the excited schoolchildren behind them were shouting. There’s no law saying you can terrorise second-years and get away with it!

Good God, good God! Back then there was sunshine, noise and clamour. And Maksim wasn’t like he is today – white-haired, sorrowful and hungry. Maksim had a thick head of black hair with just a few grey strands here and there; he had iron bars for arms, and a medal the size of a carriage wheel pinned to his breast…"

The schoolyard fights described here live on in the memory of another former pupil at the First grammar school, too. The infestation – that’s what they used to call the younger schoolchildren. On one occasion we beat up two brothers from year eight. There were eighty of us… Even so, when one of the brothers made a move on us, we rushed to get out of the way. It was Mikhail who encouraged us to get into that fight. But Paustovsky [he attended the same school but was two years below Bulgakov – M.C.] wrote in his memoirs: ‘Wherever Bulgakov cropped up, his class would always win.’ This was an exaggeration, Yevgeny Bukreyev observes, displaying the scientist’s regard for accuracy. "He would take part in the fights, but he wasn’t anything special. There was a boy named Ipat, for instance, we called him ‘Patka’; he was quite short, but he was incredibly strong. Everyone used to call for him when a fight broke out, they would shout: ‘Patka, Patka!’ – and he really did win every fight in which he was involved… But Bulgakov was ever-present as a participant in these fights.

We used to fight in the schoolyard, often organising ourselves as cavalry: the weaker boys would get on the shoulders of the stronger ones. One of the sons of a professor from the Spiritual Academy, Golubev, was always the kon ‘horse’, and was consequently given the nickname ‘koninchen’, one that stuck…"

After the fourth year, though, all of that began to take a back seat.

When we made the transition from the fourth year at school to the fifth, we had to start living more of a public-spirited life, you might say. In the fourth year, for instance (i.e. at the age of 13-14), we were required to read Bekel and Drepper. In the fifth year, we started attending a wide range of discussion groups, on economics, philosophy, religion and theology. Bulgakov never joined any of them, my fellow academic asserts. In the fifth year of school, we started interacting with the sixth, seventh and eighth years. The discussion groups were open to all these year groups. There would usually be 5-8 people in each group. These were all extramural activities – we would meet up at someone’s house, never at school. The groups were always led by teachers from the school. In Selikhanovich’s group, they talked about literary and philosophical matters – in the fifth year, you had to study Vindelband’s philosophy textbook, for example. Bulgakov didn’t join that group, he was inactive in that regard… When we reached the fifth year, it so happened that it was the year 1905, and all that that year brought with it. We used to smash the windows, of course, and spray ink from the inkwells; Bulgakov took part in this – in the same way that he took part in every collective activity… Naturally, we thought it a great lark to barricade ourselves up in the classroom and not let the teachers come in to teach us! We also used to elect a public council for the school, consisting of 1 or 2 people from each class. I remember the council meetings being held in some strange apartment, with kids lying about on beds and smoking…fiery speeches were made – but it never went any further than that… Bulgakov never once attended a single council meeting, protest or assembly. For three or four weeks there was complete lawlessness at the school, utter chaos, and then everything settled down again. Thanks to the head-teacher, Y.A. Bessmertny, none of the pupils came to any harm."

(This is quite an achievement, let us point out in parentheses. Few and far between are the academic institutions which, at this time or indeed at any other period in Russia’s history, could boast of such behaviour on the part of their