The life and mysterious death of Mikhail Bulgakov. Mikhail Bulgakov, biography, news, photos Bulgakov’s last work

For many, Mikhail Bulgakov is their favorite writer. His biography is interpreted differently by people of different directions. The reason is how certain researchers relate his name to the occult. For those interested in this particular aspect, we can recommend reading the article by Pavel Globa. However, in any case, its presentation should begin from childhood, which is what we will do.

The writer's parents, brothers and sisters

Mikhail Afanasyevich was born in Kiev in the family of a theology professor Afanasy Ivanovich, who taught at the Theological Academy. His mother, Varvara Mikhailovna Pokrovskaya, also taught at the Karachay gymnasium. Both parents were hereditary bell nobles; their priest grandfathers served in the Oryol province.

Misha himself was the eldest child in the family; he had two brothers: Nikolai, Ivan and four sisters: Vera, Nadezhda, Varvara, Elena.

The future writer was thin, graceful, artistic with expressive blue eyes.

Education and character of Mikhail

Bulgakov received his education in his hometown. His biography contains information about graduating from the First Kyiv Gymnasium at the age of eighteen and from the medical faculty of Kyiv University at the age of twenty-five. What influenced the formation of the future writer? The untimely death of his 48-year-old father, the stupid suicide of his best comrade Boris Bogdanov because of love for Varya Bulgakova, the sister of Mikhail Afanasyevich - all these circumstances determined the character of Bulgakov: suspicious, prone to neuroses.

First wife

At twenty-two, the future writer married his first wife, Tatyana Lappa, a year younger than him. Judging by the memoirs of Tatyana Nikolaevna (she lived until 1982), a film could be made about this short marriage. The newlyweds managed to spend the money sent by their parents on a veil and wedding dress before the wedding. For some reason they laughed at the wedding. Of the flowers given to the newlyweds, the majority were daffodils. The bride was wearing a linen skirt, and her mother, who arrived and was horrified, managed to buy her a blouse for the wedding. Bulgakov's biography by date, thus, culminated in the wedding date of April 26, 1913. However, the happiness of the lovers was destined to be short-lived: in Europe at that time there was already a smell of war. According to Tatyana’s recollections, Mikhail did not like to save money, he was not distinguished by prudence in spending money. For him, for example, it was in the order of things to order a taxi with his last money. Valuable items were often pawned in pawn shops. Although Tatiana’s father helped the young couple with money, the funds constantly disappeared.

Medical practice

Fate rather cruelly prevented him from becoming a doctor, even though Bulgakov had talent and professional flair. The biography mentions that he had the misfortune of contracting dangerous diseases while engaging in professional activities. Mikhail Afanasyevich, wanting to realize himself as a specialist, was active as a doctor. Over the course of a year, Dr. Bulgakov saw 15,361 patients at outpatient appointments (forty people a day!). 211 people were treated in his hospital. However, as you can see, Fate itself prevented him from becoming a doctor. In 1917, having become infected with diphtheria, Mikhail Afanasyevich took a serum against it. The result was a severe allergy. He relieved her painful symptoms with morphine, but then became addicted to this drug.

Bulgakov's recovery

His admirers owe the healing of Mikhail Bulgakov to Tatyana Lappa, who deliberately limited his dose. When he asked for an injection of a dose of the drug, his loving wife injected him with distilled water. At the same time, she stoically endured her husband’s hysterics, although he once threw a burning Primus stove at her and even threatened her with a pistol. At the same time, his loving wife was sure that he did not want to shoot, he just felt very bad...

Bulgakov's short biography contains the fact of high love and sacrifice. In 1918, it was thanks to Tatyana Lappa that he stopped being a morphine addict. From December 1917 to March 1918, Bulgakov lived and practiced in Moscow with his uncle on his mother’s side, the successful gynecologist N. M. Pokrovsky (later the prototype of Professor Preobrazhensky from “The Heart of a Dog”).

Then he returned to Kyiv, where he again began working as a venereologist. The practice was interrupted by the war. He never returned to medical practice...

World War I and Civil War

The First World War marked moves for Bulgakov: at first he worked as a doctor near the front line, then he was sent to work in the Smolensk province, and then to Vyazma. During the Civil War from 1919 to 1921, he was mobilized twice as a doctor. First - to the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, then - to the White Guard Armed Forces of the South of Russia. This period of his life later found its literary reflection in the cycle of stories “Notes of a Young Doctor” (1925-1927). One of the stories it contains is called "Morphine".

In 1919, on November 26, for the first time in his life, he published an article in the Grozny newspaper, which, in fact, presented the gloomy forebodings of a White Guard officer. The Red Army at Yegorlytskaya station in 1921 defeated the advanced forces of the White Guards - the Cossack cavalry... His comrades are riding beyond the cordon. However, fate prevents Mikhail Afanasyevich from emigrating: he falls ill with typhus. In Vladikavkaz, Bulgakov is being treated for a fatal illness and is recovering. His biography records the reorientation of life goals, creativity takes over.

Playwright

Mikhail Afanasyevich, emaciated, in the uniform of a white officer, but with torn shoulder straps, in Tersky Narobraz works in the theater section of the arts department, in the Russian theater. During this period, a severe crisis occurred in Bulgakov’s life. There is no money at all. She and Tatyana Lappa live by selling the severed parts of a miraculously surviving gold chain. Bulgakov made a difficult decision for himself - never to return to medical practice. With a tormented heart, in 1920 Mikhail Bulgakov wrote the most talented play “Days of the Turbins”. The writer’s biography testifies to the first repressions against him: in the same 1920, the Bolshevik commission expelled him from work as a “former”. Bulgakov is trampled, broken. Then the writer decides to flee the country: first to Turkey, then to France, he moves from Vladikavkaz to Tiflis via Baku. In order to survive, he betrays himself, Truth, and Conscience and in 1921 writes the conformist play “Sons of the Mullah,” which the Bolshevik theaters of Vladikavkaz willingly include in their repertoire. At the end of May 1921, while in Batumi, Mikhail Bulgakov summoned his wife. His biography contains information about the gravest crisis in the writer’s life. Fate cruelly takes revenge on him for betraying his conscience and talent (meaning the above-mentioned play, for which he received a fee of 200,000 rubles (33 pieces of silver). This situation will repeat again in his life).

Bulgakovs in Moscow

The spouses still do not emigrate. In August 1921, Tatyana Lappa left alone for Moscow through Odessa and Kyiv.

Soon, following his wife, Mikhail Afanasyevich also returned to Moscow (it was during this period that N. Gumilyov was shot and A. Blok died). Their life in the capital is accompanied by moving, instability... Bulgakov’s biography is not easy. A brief summary of her subsequent period is the desperate attempts of a talented person to realize himself. Mikhail and Tatyana live in the apartment (described in the novel “The Master and Margarita” - house number 10 on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street (Pigit’s house), number 302 bis, which was kindly provided to them by their brother-in-law, philologist A.M. Zemsky, who left for Kyiv to his wife). The house was inhabited by rowdy and drinking proletarians. The couple felt uncomfortable, hungry, and penniless. This is where their breakup occurred...

In 1922, Mikhail Afanasyevich suffered a personal blow - his mother died. He feverishly begins to work as a journalist, putting his sarcasm into feuilletons.

Literary activity. “Days of the Turbins” - Stalin’s favorite play

Lived life experience and thoughts, born of a remarkable intellect, were simply torn onto paper. A short biography of Bulgakov records his work as a feuilletonist in Moscow newspapers ("Worker") and magazines ("Renaissance", "Russia", "Medical Worker").

Life, distorted by the war, begins to improve. Since 1923, Bulgakov was accepted as a member of the Writers' Union.

In 1923, Bulgakov began working on the novel The White Guard. He creates his famous works:

• "Diaboliad";
• "Fatal Eggs";
• "Dog's heart".

• "Adam and Eve";
• "Alexander Pushkin";
• "Crimson Island";
• "Run";
• "Bliss";
• “Zoyka’s apartment”;
• "Ivan Vasilievich."

And in 1925 he married Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya.

He also became successful as a playwright. Even then, the Soviet state’s paradoxical perception of the classic’s work was evident. Even Joseph Stalin was contradictory and inconsistent in relation to him. He watched the Moscow Art Theater production "Days of the Turbins" 14 times. Then he declared that “Bulgakov is not ours.” However, in 1932, he ordered its return, and in the only theater in the USSR - the Moscow Art Theater, noting that after all, “the impression of the play on the communists” was positive.

Moreover, Joseph Stalin subsequently, in his historical address to the people on July 3, 1941, uses the phraseology of Alexei Turbin’s words: “I am addressing you, my friends...”

In the period from 1923 to 1926, the writer’s creativity flourished. In the fall of 1924, in literary circles in Moscow, Bulgakov was considered the No. 1 active writer. The biography and work of the writer are inseparably linked. He develops a literary career, which becomes the main work of his life.

The writer's short and fragile second marriage

The first wife, Tatyana Lappa, recalls that, while married to her, Mikhail Afanasyevich repeated more than once that he should marry three times. He repeated this after the writer Alexei Tolstoy, who considered such family life to be the key to the writer’s fame. There is a saying: the first wife is from God, the second is from people, the third is from the devil. Was Bulgakov’s biography artificially formed according to this far-fetched scenario? Interesting facts and mysteries are not uncommon in it! However, Bulgakov’s second wife, Belozerskaya, a socialite, actually married a wealthy, promising writer.

However, the writer lived in perfect harmony with his new wife for only three years. Until in 1928, the writer’s third wife, Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya, “appeared on the horizon.” Bulgakov was still in his second official marriage when this whirlwind romance began. The writer described his feelings for his third wife with great artistic force in The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Afanasyevich’s affection for the new woman with whom he felt a spiritual connection is evidenced by the fact that on 10/03/1932 the registry office dissolved his marriage with Belozerskaya, and on 10/04/1932 an alliance was concluded with Shilovskaya. It was the third marriage that became the main thing in his life for the writer.

Bulgakov and Stalin: the writer’s lost game

In 1928, inspired by his acquaintance with “his Margarita” - Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya, Mikhail Bulgakov began creating his novel “The Master and Margarita”. A short biography of the writer, however, testifies to the onset of a creative crisis. He needs space for creativity, which does not exist in the USSR. Moreover, there was a ban on the publication and production of Bulgakov. Despite his fame, his plays were not staged in theaters.

Joseph Vissarionovich, an excellent psychologist, knew very well the weak sides of the personality of this talented author: suspiciousness, a tendency to depression. He played with the writer like a cat plays with a mouse, having an indisputable dossier against him. On 05/07/1926, the only search of all time was carried out at the Bulgakovs’ apartment. The personal diaries of Mikhail Afanasyevich and the seditious story “The Heart of a Dog” fell into Stalin’s hands. In Stalin's game against the writer, a trump card was obtained that fatally led to the disaster of the writer Bulgakov. Here is the answer to the question: “Is Bulgakov’s biography interesting?” Not at all. Until the age of thirty, his adult life was filled with suffering from poverty and instability; then, indeed, six years of more or less measured prosperous life followed, but this was followed by a violent break in Bulgakov’s personality, illness and death.

Refusal to leave the USSR. The leader's fatal call

In July 1929, the writer addressed a Letter to Joseph Stalin, asking to leave the USSR, and on March 28, 1930, he addressed the Soviet government with the same request. Permission was not given.

Bulgakov suffered, he understood that his grown talent was being ruined. Contemporaries remembered the phrase he uttered after yet another failure to receive permission to leave: “I was blinded!”

However, this was not the final blow. And he was expected... Everything changed with Stalin’s call on April 18, 1930. At that moment, Mikhail Bulgakov and his third wife, Elena Sergeevna, were laughing as they drove to Batum (where Bulgakov was going to write a play about Stalin’s young years). At the Serpukhov station, a woman who entered their carriage announced: “Telegram for the accountant!”

The writer, uttering an involuntary exclamation, turned pale, and then corrected her: “Not to the accountant, but to Bulgakov.” He expected... Stalin scheduled a telephone conversation for the same date - 04/18/1930.

The day before, Mayakovsky was buried. Obviously, the leader’s call could equally be called a kind of prevention (he respected Bulgakov, but still put gentle pressure) and a trick: in a confidential conversation, extract an unfavorable promise from the interlocutor.

In it, Bulgakov voluntarily refused to go abroad, which he could not forgive himself for the rest of his life. This was his tragic loss.

A very complex knot of relationships connects Stalin and Bulgakov. We can say that seminarian Dzhdugashvili outplayed and broke both the will and life of the great writer.

Last years of creativity

Subsequently, the author concentrated all his talent, all his skill on the novel “The Master and Margarita,” which he wrote for the table, without any hope of publication.

The play “Batum” created about Stalin was rejected by the secretariat of Joseph Vissarionovich, pointing out the methodological error of the writer - the transformation of the leader into a romantic hero.

In fact, Joseph Vissarionovich was jealous, so to speak, of the writer of his own charisma. From then on, Bulgakov was allowed to work only as a theater director.

By the way, Mikhail Afanasyevich is considered one of the best directors in the history of Russian theater, Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin (his favorite classics).

Everything he wrote, unspoken and biased, was “impossible.” Stalin consistently destroyed him as a writer.

Bulgakov nevertheless wrote, he responded to the blow, as a real classic could do... A novel about Pontius Pilate. About an all-powerful autocrat who is secretly afraid.

Moreover, the first version of this novel was burned by the author. It was called differently - “Devil's Hoof”. In Moscow, after writing it, there were rumors that Bulgakov wrote about Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich was born with two fused toes. People call this the hoof of Satan). Panicking, the author burned the first version of the novel. This is where the phrase “Manuscripts don’t burn!” was subsequently born.

Instead of a conclusion

In 1939, the final version of The Master and Margarita was written and read to friends. This book was destined to be published for the first time in an abridged version only after 33 years... The terminally ill Bulgakov, suffering from kidney failure, did not have long to live...

In the fall of 1939, his vision deteriorated critically: he was practically blind. On March 10, 1940, the writer passed away. Mikhail Bulgakov was buried on March 12, 1940 at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Bulgakov's full biography is still a subject of debate. The reason is that the Soviet, emasculated version presents the reader with an embellished picture of the author’s loyalty to the Soviet regime. Therefore, if you are interested in the life of a writer, you should critically analyze several sources.

One can bow one’s head low before the talent of this wonderful Russian and Soviet writer. Almost all of Bulgakov's most famous works have been disassembled into quotes. Mikhail Afanasyevich considered Gogol to be his teacher, he imitated him and also became a mystic. Until now, writers do not have a common opinion on whether Bulgakov was an occultist. But he was a great playwright and theater director, the author of many feuilletons, stories, plays, film scripts, dramatizations and opera librettos. Bulgakov's works were staged in theaters and filmed. When his first dramatic experiments appeared, he wrote to his relative that he was four years late with what he should have started long ago - writing.

Mikhail Bulgakov, whose books are almost always heard, has become a true classic, whom descendants will never forget. He predicted the fate of his works with one brilliant phrase: “Manuscripts don’t burn!”

Biography

Bulgakov was born on May 3, 1891 in Kyiv in the family of professor of the Theological Academy Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov and Varvara Mikhailovna, nee Pokrovskaya. The future writer, having graduated from high school, entered the medical institute of his native city, wanting to follow in the footsteps of his famous uncle N. M. Pokrovsky. In 1916, after graduating, he practiced for several months in the front-line zone. Then he worked as a venereologist, and during the civil war he managed to work for both the whites and the reds and survive.

Works of Bulgakov

His rich literary life began after moving to Moscow. There, in well-known publishing houses, he publishes his feuilletons. Then he writes the books “Fatal Eggs” and “Diaboliad” (1925). Behind them he creates the play “Days of the Turbins”. Bulgakov's works provoked sharp criticism from many, but be that as it may, with each masterpiece he wrote, there were more and more admirers. As a writer he enjoyed enormous success. Then, in 1928, he had the idea of ​​writing the novel The Master and Margarita.

In 1939, the writer was working on a play about Stalin, “Batum,” and when it was ready for production and Bulgakov went with his wife and colleagues to Georgia, a telegram soon arrived saying that Stalin considered it inappropriate to stage a play about himself. This greatly undermined the writer’s health, he began to lose his vision, and then doctors diagnosed him with kidney disease. For pain, Bulgakov again began to use morphine, which he had taken back in 1924. At the same time, the writer was dictating the last pages of the “Master and Margarita” manuscript to his wife. A quarter of a century later, traces of the drug were found on the pages.

He died at 48 on March 10, 1940. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. Mikhail Bulgakov, whose books over time became real bestsellers, if we speak in modern language, and still stir the minds of people who are trying to unravel his codes and messages, was truly great. It is a fact. Bulgakov's works are still relevant, they have not lost their meaning and fascination.

Master

“The Master and Margarita” is a novel that has become a reference book for millions of readers, and not only Bulgakov’s compatriots, but throughout the whole world. Several decades have passed, and the plot still excites minds, attracts with mysticism and riddles that prompt various philosophical and religious thoughts. “The Master and Margarita” is a novel studied in schools, and this is even though not every literature-savvy person can understand the intent of this masterpiece. Bulgakov began writing the novel in the 20s, then with all the amendments to the plot and title, the work was finally formalized in 1937. But in the USSR the complete book was published only in 1973.

Woland

The creation of the novel was influenced by M. A. Bulgakov’s passion for various mystical literature, German mythology of the 19th century, Holy Scripture, Goethe’s Faust, as well as many other demonological works.

Many are impressed by one of the main characters of the novel - Woland. To not particularly thoughtful and trusting readers, this Prince of Darkness may seem like an ardent fighter for justice and goodness, opposing the vices of people. There are also opinions that Bulgakov portrayed Stalin in this image. But Woland is not so easy to understand, this is a very multifaceted and difficult character, this is the image that defines the real Tempter. This is the real prototype of the Antichrist, whom people should perceive as the new Messiah.

Tale

“Fatal Eggs” is another fantastic story by Bulgakov, published in 1925. He moves his heroes to 1928. The main character - a brilliant inventor, professor of zoology Persikov, one day makes a unique discovery - he discovers a certain phenomenal stimulant, a red ray of life, which, acting on living embryos (embryos), makes them develop faster and they become larger than their usual counterparts. They are also aggressive and reproduce incredibly quickly.

Well, further in the work “Fatal Eggs” everything develops exactly as in Bismarck’s words that the revolution is prepared by geniuses, carried out by romantic fanatics, but the fruits are enjoyed by scoundrels. And so it happened: Persikov became the genius who created the revolutionary idea in biology, Ivanov became the fanatic who brought the professor’s ideas to life by building cameras. And the rogue is Rokk, who appeared from nowhere and just as suddenly disappeared.

According to philologists, the prototype of Persikov could be the Russian biologist A. G. Gurvich, who discovered mitogenetic radiation, and, in fact, the leader of the proletariat V. I. Lenin.

Play

“Days of the Turbins” is a play by Bulgakov, created by him in 1925 (at the Moscow Art Theater they wanted to stage a play based on his novel “The White Guard”). The plot was based on the writer's memoirs during the civil war about the fall of the regime of Ukrainian hetman Pavel Skoropadsky, then about Petliura's rise to power and his expulsion from the city by Bolshevik revolutionaries. Against the backdrop of constant struggle and change of power, the family tragedy of the Turbin couple appears in parallel, in which the foundations of the old world are broken. Bulgakov then lived in Kyiv (1918-1919). A year later the play was staged, then it was repeatedly edited and the name was changed.

“Days of the Turbins” is a play that today’s critics consider the pinnacle of the writer’s theatrical success. However, at the very beginning, her stage fate was difficult and unpredictable. The play was a huge success, but received devastating critical reviews. In 1929, it was removed from the repertoire; Bulgakov began to be accused of philistinism and propaganda of the white movement. But on the instructions of Stalin, who loved this play, the performance was restored. For the writer, who did odd jobs, the production at the Moscow Art Theater was practically the only source of income.

About myself and the bureaucracy

“Notes on Cuffs” is a story that is somewhat autobiographical. Bulgakov wrote it between 1922 and 1923. It was not published during his lifetime; today part of the text is lost. The main motive of the work “Notes on Cuffs” was the writer’s problematic relationship with the authorities. He described in great detail his life in the Caucasus, the debate about A.S. Pushkin, the first months in Moscow and the desire to emigrate. Bulgakov really intended to flee abroad in 1921, but he did not have the money to pay the captain of the shipping machine going to Constantinople.

“Diaboliada” is a story that was created in 1925. Bulgakov called himself a mystic, but, despite the declared mysticism, the content of this work consisted of pictures of ordinary everyday life, where, following Gogol, he showed the unreasonableness and illogicality of social existence. It is from this foundation that Bulgakov’s satire consists.

“Diaboliada” is a story in which the plot takes place in a mystical whirlwind of bureaucratic whirlwind with the rustling of papers on tables and in endless bustle. The main character - the little official Korotkov - is chasing along long corridors and floors after a certain mythical manager, Long John, who either appears, then disappears, or even splits into two. In this relentless pursuit, Korotkov loses both himself and his name. And then he turns into a pitiful and defenseless little man. As a result, Korotkov, in order to escape from this enchanted cycle, has only one thing left to do - throw himself from the roof of a skyscraper.

Moliere

"The Life of Monsieur de Molière" is a novelized biography, which, like many other works, was not published during the author's lifetime. Only in 1962 did the Young Guard publishing house publish it in the ZhZL book series. In 1932, Bulgakov entered into an agreement with a magazine and newspaper publishing house and wrote about Moliere for the ZhZL series. A year later he finished the work and passed it. Editor A. N. Tikhonov wrote a review in which he recognized Bulgakov’s talent, but in general the review was negative. Mainly he did not like the non-Marxist position and the fact that the story has a narrator (“a cheeky young man”). Bulgakov was offered to remake the novel in the classical spirit of historical storytelling, but the writer categorically refused. Gorky also read the manuscript and also spoke negatively about it. Bulgakov wanted to meet with him several times, but all attempts remained unsuccessful. For obvious reasons, the Soviet leadership often did not like Bulgakov's works.

The illusion of freedom

In his book, Bulgakov raises a very important topic for him using the example of Moliere: power and art, how free an artist can be. When Moliere's patience ran out, he exclaimed that he hated royal tyranny. In the same way, Bulgakov hated Stalin's tyranny. And in order to somehow persuade himself, he writes that, it turns out, evil lies not in the supreme power, but in those around the leader, in officials and newspaper Pharisees. In the 30s, there really was a large part of the intelligentsia who believed in Stalin’s innocence and innocence, so Bulgakov fed himself with similar illusions. Mikhail Afanasyevich tried to understand one of the characteristics of the artist - fatal loneliness among people.

Satire on power

Bulgakov’s story “The Heart of a Dog” became another of Bulgakov’s masterpieces, which he wrote in 1925. The most common political interpretation boils down to the idea of ​​the “Russian revolution” and the “awakening” of the social consciousness of the proletariat. One of the main characters is Sharikov, who received a large number of rights and freedoms. And then he quickly reveals selfish interests, he betrays and destroys both those who are like him and those who endowed him with all these rights. The end of this work shows that the fate of Sharikov’s creators is predetermined. In his story, Bulgakov seems to predict the massive Stalinist repressions of the 1930s.

Many literary scholars consider Bulgakov’s story “The Heart of a Dog” to be a political satire on the government of that time. And here are their main roles: Sharikov-Chugunkin is none other than Stalin himself (as evidenced by the “iron surname”), Preobrazhensky is Lenin (the one who transformed the country), Doctor Bormental (who is constantly in conflict with Sharikov) is Trotsky ( Bronstein), Shvonder - Kamenev, Zina - Zinoviev, Daria - Dzerzhinsky, etc.

Pamphlet

At a meeting of writers in Gazetny Lane, where the manuscript was read, an OGPU agent was present, who noted that such things read in a brilliant metropolitan literary circle could be much more dangerous than speeches by 101st grade writers at meetings of the All-Russian Union of Poets.

Bulgakov hoped to the last that the work would be published in the almanac "Nedra", but it was not even allowed into Glavlit for reading, but the manuscript was somehow handed over to L. Kamenev, who noted that this work should under no circumstances be published, since it is a poignant pamphlet on modern times. Then in 1926 there was a search of Bulgakov, the manuscripts of the book and the diary were confiscated, they were returned to the author only three years after the petition of Maxim Gorky.

Even on the verge of death, Mikhail Afanasyevich did not stop polishing one of the most mysterious works of Russian literature of the 20th century, making corrections to the manuscript of the novel. The last phrase edited by the author was Margarita’s remark: “So this means that the writers are going after the coffin?”

In the first days of the New Year, my condition was serious. On January 6, he makes notes for the play, which he had been thinking about over the past year - “conceived in the fall of 1939. Started with a pen on January 6, 1940. Play. Closet, exit. Bird home. Alhambra. Musketeers. Monologue about impudence. Grenada. Death of Grenada. Richard I. I can’t write anything, my head is like a cauldron... I’m sick, I’m sick...”

From Marietta Chudakova’s book “The Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov”

Being a doctor, he understood that his days were numbered; as a writer and philosopher, he did not believe that death was the end: “I sometimes imagine that death is a continuation of life. We just can't imagine how this happens. But somehow it happens...” (from the memoirs of Sergei Ermolinsky).

1. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his first literary work, the story “The Adventures of Svetlana,” at the age of seven. In the fifth grade of the gymnasium, the feuilleton “The Day of the Chief Physician” came out from his pen; the future writer also composed epigrams and satirical poems. But young Bulgakov considered medicine to be his real calling in life and dreamed of becoming a doctor.

Children's play "Princess Pea". On the reverse side there is an explanatory inscription by N.A. Bulgakova: “Syngaevskys, Bulgakovs and others. Misha plays the role of Leshy brilliantly.” (Lies on the right). 1903

2. Bulgakov collected theater tickets from all the performances and concerts he ever attended.

Mikhail Bulgakov and director Leonid Baratov, 1928

3. The writer collected newspaper and magazine clippings with critics' reviews of his works, especially plays, into a special album. Among the published reviews, according to Bulgakov’s calculations, there were 298 negative and only three assessed the master’s work positively.

Mikhail Bulgakov with Moscow Art Theater artists in a Moscow radio studio. 1934

4. The first production at the Moscow Art Theater of “The Days of the Turbins” (the original title “The White Guard” had to be changed for ideological reasons) was saved by Konstantin Stanislavsky, declaring that if the play was banned, he would close the theater. But from the work it was necessary to remove an important scene of the Petliurists beating a Jew, in the finale to introduce the “ever increasing” sounds of the “International” and a toast to the Bolsheviks and the Red Army from the lips of Myshlaevsky.

5. Stalin loved “The Turbins” very much, watched the performance at least 15 times, enthusiastically applauding the artists from the government box. Eight times the “Father of Nations” was at “Zoyka’s Apartment” in the Theater. E. Vakhtangov. While encouraging the intensity of the political struggle in literature (individual blows also reached Bulgakov, painfully affecting his creative and personal destiny), Stalin at the same time patronized the writer.

6. In 1926, during the landmark debate “Theatrical Policy of Soviet Power,” which opened with Lunacharsky’s report, Vladimir Mayakovsky made noise about the Moscow Art Theater: “... we started with Aunt Manya and Uncle Vanya and ended with the White Guard! We accidentally gave Bulgakov the opportunity to squeak under the arm of the bourgeoisie - and he squeaked. We won't give it any further. (Voice from the audience: “Ban it?”) No, not ban it. What will you achieve by prohibiting it? That this literature will be carried around the corners and read with the same pleasure as I read Yesenin’s poems in rewritten form two hundred times ... "
Mayakovsky suggested simply booing “Days of the Turbins” in the theater. At the same time, the singer of the revolution was often Bulgakov’s partner in billiards, but the “civil war” of their views continued until the tragic death of the poet.

7. In 1934, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov wrote a comedy play “Ivan Vasilyevich” about how Moscow inventor Nikolai Ivanovich Timofeev creates a time machine and, with its help, transports Tsar Ivan the Terrible to the 30s of the 20th century. In turn, the house manager Bunsha-Koretsky, like two peas in a pod like the formidable ruler of all Rus', and the swindler Georges Miloslavsky fall into the past. Since the similarities between the character of Ivan Vasilyevich and the personality of Joseph Stalin were obvious, the play was never published during the author’s lifetime.

In 1973, “Ivan Vasilyevich”, filmed by Leonid Gaidai, was shown in cinemas across the country with triumphant success. The director carefully handled Bulgakov's plan, changing only a few details, in particular, he moved the action to the 70s of the twentieth century and modernized the situation - for example, the place of the gramophone was taken by a tape recorder that was more appropriate for the time of the film's release.

8. In 1937, when the hundredth anniversary of the tragic death of Pushkin was celebrated, several authors presented plays dedicated to the poet. Among them was Bulgakov’s play “Alexander Pushkin,” which was distinguished from the works of other playwrights by the absence of a main character. The writer believed that the appearance of Alexander Sergeevich on stage would look vulgar and tasteless.

9. Woland's famous assistant, the cat Behemoth, had a real prototype. Mikhail Bulgakov had a black dog named Behemoth. This dog was very smart.

Stone from the grave of Nikolai Gogol on the grave of Mikhail Bulgakov

10. After the death of the writer, his widow Elena Shilovskaya chose a huge granite block as a tombstone - “Golgotha”, so named for its resemblance to a mountain. For a hundred years this stone was the foot of the cross at the grave of Gogol, the writer whom Bulgakov idolized. But when they decided to install a bust at the burial site of Nikolai Gogol, the stone, fulfilling Bulgakov’s dying will (“Cover me with your cast-iron overcoat,” he wrote in one of his last letters), was moved to the Novodevichy cemetery.

One of the last photos. Mikhail Bulgakov with his wife Elena Shilovskaya.

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov - Russian writer.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born on May 15 (May 3, old style) 1891, in Kyiv, in the family of Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, a professor at the Department of Western Religions of the Kyiv Theological Academy. The family was large (Mikhail is the eldest son, he had four more sisters and two brothers) and friendly. Later, M. Bulgakov will remember more than once about his “carefree” youth in a beautiful city on the Dnieper steeps, about the comfort of a noisy and warm native nest on Andreevsky Spusk, and the shining prospects for a future free and wonderful life.

The role of family also played an undeniable influence on the future writer: the firm hand of Varvara Mikhailovna’s mother, who was not inclined to doubt what is good and what is evil (idleness, despondency, selfishness), education and hard work of her father (“My love is green lamp and books in my office,” Mikhail Bulgakov would later write, remembering his father staying up late at work). In the family there reigns the unconditional authority of knowledge and contempt for ignorance that is not aware of it.

When Mikhail was 16 years old, his father died of kidney disease. Nevertheless, the future has not yet been canceled; Bulgakov becomes a student at the Faculty of Medicine at Kyiv University. “The medical profession seemed brilliant to me,” he would say later, explaining his choice. Possible arguments in favor of medicine: independence of future activity (private practice), interest in the “human structure,” as well as the opportunity to help him. Next is the first marriage, which was too early for that time. Mikhail, a second-year student, against the wishes of his mother, marries young Tatyana Lappa, who has just graduated from high school.

Young doctor Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov's studies at the university were interrupted ahead of schedule. The world war was going on, in the spring of 1916, Mikhail was released from the university as a “warrior of the second militia” (his diploma was received later) and voluntarily went to work in one of the Kyiv hospitals. Wounded, suffering people became his medical baptism. “Will anyone pay for blood? No. Nobody,” he wrote a few years later on the pages of The White Guard. In the fall of 1916, Doctor Bulgakov received his first appointment - to a small zemstvo hospital in the Smolensk province.

The choice associated with the constant tension of the moral field, against the backdrop of a breakdown in the routine course of life, extreme everyday life, shaped the future writer. It is characterized by a desire for positive, effective knowledge - serious reflection on the atheistic worldview of the “naturalist”, on the one hand, and faith in a higher principle, on the other. One more thing is important: medical practice left no room for deconstructive mindsets. Perhaps this is why Bulgakov was not affected by the modernist trends of the beginning of the century.

The daily surgical practice of a recent student who worked in military field hospitals, then the invaluable experience of a rural doctor, forced to cope alone with numerous and unexpected diseases, saving human lives. The need to make independent decisions, responsibility. Moreover, the rare gift of a brilliant diagnostician. Later, Mikhail Afanasyevich showed himself as a social diagnostician. It is obvious how insightful the writer turned out to be in his disappointing forecast of the development of social processes in the country.

At the turning point

While yesterday's student was growing up, turning into a determined and experienced zemstvo doctor, events began in Russia that would determine its fate for many decades to come. The abdication of the Tsar, the February days, and finally the October Revolution of 1917. “The present is such that I try to live without noticing it... Recently, on a trip to Moscow and Saratov, I had to see everything with my own eyes, and I would not want to see anything more. I saw how gray crowds, whooping and vile swearing, broke windows on trains, I saw people being beaten. I saw destroyed and burnt houses in Moscow... stupid and brutal faces... I saw crowds that besieged the entrances of captured and locked banks, hungry tails at the shops... I saw newspaper sheets where they write, in essence, about one thing: about blood , which flows in the south, and in the west, and in the east, and about prisons. I saw everything with my own eyes, and finally understood what happened” (from a letter from Mikhail Bulgakov on December 31, 1917 to his sister Nadezhda).

In March 1918, Bulgakov returned to Kyiv. Waves of White Guards, Petliurists, Germans, Bolsheviks, nationalists of Hetman Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky, and Bolsheviks again roll through the city. Every government is mobilizing, and doctors are needed by everyone who holds a gun in their hands. Bulgakov was also mobilized. As a military doctor, he goes to the North Caucasus with the retreating Volunteer Army. The fact that Bulgakov remained in Russia was only a consequence of a confluence of circumstances, and not a free choice: he lay in typhoid fever when the White army and its sympathizers left the country. Later, T.N. Lappa testified that Bulgakov more than once blamed her for not taking him, who was sick, out of Russia.

Upon recovery, Mikhail Bulgakov left medicine and began collaborating with newspapers. One of his first journalistic articles is called “Future Prospects.” The author, who does not hide his commitment to the white idea, prophesies that Russia will lag behind the West for a long time. The first dramatic experiments appeared in Vladikavkaz: the one-act humoresque “Self-Defense”, “Paris Communards”, the drama “The Turbin Brothers” and “Sons of the Mullah”. All of them were performed on the stage of the Vladikavkaz Theater. But the author treated them as steps forced by circumstances. The author will evaluate “Sons of the Mullah” as follows: “they were written by three people: me, the assistant attorney and the hunger. In 1921, at its beginning...” About a more thoughtful piece (“The Turbin Brothers”), he will tell his brother bitterly: “When I was called after the second act, I left with a vague feeling... I looked vaguely at the actors’ made-up faces, at the thundering hall. And I thought: “but this is my dream come true... but how ugly: instead of the Moscow stage, the provincial stage, instead of the drama about Alyosha Turbin, which I cherished, a hastily made, immature thing...”

Bulgakov's move to Moscow

Perhaps the change of profession was dictated by circumstances: a recent military doctor in the White Army lived in a city where Bolshevik power was established. Soon Bulgakov moved to Moscow, where writers flocked from all over the country. Numerous literary circles were created in the capital, private publishing houses were opened, and bookstores operated. In the hungry and cold Moscow of 1921, Bulgakov persistently mastered a new profession: he wrote in Gudka, collaborated with the Berlin editorial office of Nakanune, attended creative circles, and made literary acquaintances. He treats forced work in a newspaper as a hateful and meaningless activity. But you also have to earn a living. “... I have lived a triple life,” wrote Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov in the unfinished story “To a Secret Friend” (1929), born as a letter to the writer’s third wife, Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya. In essays published in Nakanune, Bulgakov sneered at official slogans and newspaper cliches. “I am an ordinary man, born to crawl,” the narrator certified himself in the feuilleton “Forty Forties.” And in the essay “Red Stone Moscow” he described the cockade on the band of his uniform cap: “It’s either a hammer and a shovel, or a sickle and rake, at least not a hammer and sickle.”

“On the Eve” published “The Extraordinary Adventures of the Doctor” (1922) and “Notes on the Cuffs” (1922-1923). In The Doctor's Extraordinary Adventures, the descriptions of successive authorities and armies are given by the author with an undisguised sense of hostility. It comes to the seditious thought about the wisdom of desertion. The hero of "Adventures..." does not accept either the white idea or the red idea. From work to work, the courage of the writer, who dared to condemn both warring camps, grew stronger.

Mikhail Bulgakov mastered new material that required other forms of display: Moscow in the early 1920s, characteristic features of the new way of life, previously unknown types. At the cost of mobilizing mental and physical strength (there was a housing crisis in Moscow, and the writer lived in a room in a communal apartment, which he would later describe in the stories “Moonshine Life,” with dirt, drunken brawls and the impossibility of privacy), Bulgakov published two satirical stories: “The Devil’s Day” ( 1924) and “Fatal Eggs” (1925), wrote “Heart of a Dog” (1925). His story about the pain points of the modern day takes fantastic forms.

"Fatal Eggs"

A chicken pestilence (“Fatal Eggs”) occurred in the Soviet Republic. The government needs to restore the “chicken population”, and it turns to Professor Persikov, who discovered the “red ray”, under the influence of which living creatures not only instantly reach colossal sizes, but also become unusually aggressive in the struggle for existence. The hints about what is happening in Soviet Russia are unusually transparent and fearless. The ignorant director of the chicken state farm, Rokk, who mistakenly receives snake and ostrich eggs ordered from abroad for professorial experiments, uses a “red ray” to remove hordes of giant animals from them. The giants are marching on Moscow. The capital is saved only by a happy accident: unprecedented frosts hit it. At the end of the story, brutal crowds destroy the professor's laboratory, and his discovery perishes along with him. The accuracy of the social diagnosis proposed by Bulgakov was appreciated by wary critics, who wrote that from the story it is absolutely clear that “the Bolsheviks are completely unsuitable for creative peaceful work, although they are capable of well organizing military victories and protecting their iron order.”

"Dog's heart"

The next piece, “Heart of a Dog” (1925), was no longer put into print and was published in Russia only during the years of perestroika, in 1987. Her phrases and formulas immediately entered the oral speech of an intelligent person: “the devastation is not in the closets, but in the heads”, “everyone can occupy seven rooms”, later “sturgeon of the second freshness” and “whatever you don’t miss, nothing at all” will be added to them you are not there,” “it’s easy and pleasant to tell the truth.”

The main character of the story, Professor Preobrazhensky, conducting a medical experiment, transplants the organ of the “proletarian” Chugunkin, who died in a drunken fight, into a stray dog. Unexpectedly for the surgeon, the dog turns into a man, and this man is an exact repetition of the deceased lumpen. If Sharik, as the professor called the dog, is kind, intelligent and grateful to the new owner for the shelter, then the miraculously revived Chugunkin is militantly ignorant, vulgar and arrogant. Having convinced himself of this, the professor carries out the reverse operation, and the good-natured dog appears again in his cozy apartment.

The professor's risky surgical experiment is an allusion to the "daring social experiment" taking place in Russia. Bulgakov is not inclined to see the “people” as an ideal being. He is confident that only a difficult and long path of enlightening the masses, the path of evolution, not revolution, can lead to a real improvement in the life of the country.

"White Guard"

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov also does not let go of his experiences during the Civil War. In 1925, the first part of “The White Guard” appeared in the magazine “Russia”. During these months, the writer has a new novel, and, leaving Tatyana Lappa, he dedicates “The White Guard” to Lyubov Evgenievna Beloselskaya-Belozerskaya, who became his second wife. Bulgakov chooses the path of writing in radically changed conditions, when many are confident that the traditions of the great Russian literature of the 19th century are hopelessly outdated and are no longer interesting to anyone.

Bulgakov writes a defiantly “old-fashioned” thing: “The White Guard” opens with an epigraph from Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter”; it openly continues the traditions of Tolstoy’s family novel. In The White Guard, as in War and Peace, family thought is closely connected with the history of Russia. At the center of the novel is a broken family living in Kyiv in the “house of the white general”, on Andreevsky Spusk during the fratricidal war in Ukraine. The main characters of the novel were the doctor Alexei Turbin, his brother Nikolka and sister, the charming red-haired Elena, and their “tender, old” childhood friends. Already in the first phrase that opens “The White Guard”: “Great was the year and terrible year after the Nativity of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the revolution,” Bulgakov introduces two points of reference, two systems of values, as if “looking back” at each other. This allows the writer to more accurately assess the meaning of what is happening, to see modern events through the eyes of an impartial historian.

Back in 1923, on the pages of a diary bearing the eloquent title “Under Heel,” Mikhail Bulgakov wrote: “It cannot be that the voice that is disturbing me now is not prophetic. Can't be. I can’t be anything else, I can be one thing - a writer.” Bulgakov’s powerful entry into literature, about which Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (real name Kirienko-Voloshin) said in a private letter that it “can only be compared with the debuts of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,” will pass by the general reading public. And although the birth of a great Russian writer took place, few people noticed him.

"Days of the Turbins"

Soon the Rossiya magazine closed, and the novel remained unprinted. However, his heroes continued to disturb the writer’s consciousness. Bulgakov begins to compose a play based on The White Guard. This process is wonderfully described on the pages of the later “Notes of a Dead Man” (1936-1937) in the lines about the “magic box” that opens in the evenings in the writer’s imagination.

In the best theaters of those years there was an acute repertoire crisis. In search of new dramaturgy, the Moscow Art Theater turns to prose writers, including Bulgakov. Bulgakov's play "Days of the Turbins", written in the footsteps of the "White Guard", becomes the "second "Seagull" of the Art Theater, and People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky called it "the first political play of the Soviet theater." The premiere, which took place on October 5, 1926, made Bulgakov famous. Every performance is sold out. The story told by the playwright shocked the audience with its life-like truth of the disastrous events that many of them had recently experienced. In the wake of the resounding success of the play, the magazine “Medical Worker” published a series of stories, which would later be called “Notes of a Young Doctor” (1925-1926). These printed lines turned out to be the last that Bulgakov was destined to see during his lifetime. Another consequence of the Moscow Art Theater premiere was a flood of magazine and newspaper articles that finally noticed Bulgakov the prose writer. But official criticism branded the writer’s work as reactionary, affirming bourgeois values.

The images of white officers that Bulgakov fearlessly brought onto the stage of the best theater in the country, against the backdrop of a new audience, a new way of life, acquired an expanded meaning for the intelligentsia, no matter whether military or civilian. The play included Chekhov's motifs, the Moscow Art Theater's "Turbines" were correlated with "Three Sisters" and fell out of the current context of poster, propaganda drama of the 1920s. The performance, met with hostility by official criticism, was soon filmed, but in 1932 it was restored by the will of Stalin, who personally watched it more than a dozen times (to this day his attitude towards Bulgakov himself remains a mystery).

Drama by Mikhail Bulgakov

From that time until the end of M.A.’s life. Bulgakov no longer abandoned drama. In addition to a dozen plays, the experience of intratheater life will lead to the birth of the unfinished novel “Notes of a Dead Man” (first published in the USSR in 1965 under the title “Theatrical Novel”). The main character, an aspiring writer Maksudov, who works for the Shipping Company newspaper and writes a play based on his own novel, is undisguisedly biographical. The play is written by Maksudov for the Independent Theater, which is led by two legendary personalities - Ivan Vasilyevich and Aristarkh Platonovich. The reference to the Art Theater and two major Russian theater directors of the 20th century, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, is easily recognizable. The novel is full of love and admiration for the people of the theater, but it also satirically describes the complex characters of those who create theatrical magic, and the intra-theater ups and downs of the country's leading theater.

"Zoyka's apartment"

Almost simultaneously with “Days of the Turbins,” Bulgakov wrote the tragic farce “Zoyka’s Apartment” (1926). The plot of the play was very relevant for those years. Enterprising Zoika Peltz is trying to save money to buy foreign visas for herself and her lover by organizing an underground brothel in her own apartment. The play captures the abrupt breakdown of social reality, expressed in a change in linguistic forms. Count Obolyaninov refuses to understand what a “former count” is: “Where did I go? Here I am, standing in front of you.” With demonstrative simplicity, he does not accept not so much “new words” as new values. The brilliant chameleonism of the charming rogue Ametistov, the administrator in Zoya’s “atelier”, forms a striking contrast to the count, who does not know how to adapt to circumstances. In the counterpoint of the two central images, Amethystov and Count Obolyaninov, the deep theme of the play emerges: the theme of historical memory, the impossibility of forgetting the past.

"Crimson Island"

Zoya's Apartment was followed by the anti-censorship dramatic pamphlet The Crimson Island (1927). The play was staged by the Russian director, People's Artist of Russia Alexander Yakovlevich Tairov on the stage of the Chamber Theater, but it did not last long. The plot of "Crimson Island" with the uprising of the natives and the "world revolution" in the finale is nakedly parodic. Bulgakov's pamphlet reproduced typical and characteristic situations: a play about a native uprising is being rehearsed by an opportunistic director, who readily alters the ending to please the all-powerful Savva Lukich (who in the play was made to resemble the famous censor V. Blum).

It would seem that luck was with Bulgakov: it was impossible to get to the “Days of the Turbins” at the Moscow Art Theater, “Zoyka’s Apartment” fed the staff of the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Theater, and only for this reason the censorship was forced to endure it; The foreign press wrote admiringly about the courage of the “Crimson Island”. In the theater season of 1927-1928, Bulgakov was the most fashionable and successful playwright. But the time of Bulgakov the playwright ends just as abruptly as that of the prose writer. Bulgakov's next play, “Running” (1928), never appeared on stage.

If “Zoykina’s Apartment” told about those who remained in Russia, then “Running” spoke about the fates of those who left it. White General Khludov (he had a real prototype - General Ya. A. Slashchov), in the name of a high goal - the salvation of Russia - went to execution in the rear and therefore lost his mind; the dashing General Charnota, who rushes into attack with equal readiness both at the front and at the card table; soft and lyrical, like Pierrot, university privat-docent Golubkov, saving his beloved woman Seraphim, the ex-wife of a former minister - all of them are outlined by the playwright with psychological depth.

True to the precepts of classical Russian literature of the 19th century, Bulgakov does not caricature his heroes. Despite the fact that the characters were not at all portrayed as ideal people, they evoked sympathy, and among them there were many recent White Guards. None of her characters were eager to return to their homeland to “take part in building socialism in the USSR,” as Stalin advised to end the play. The issue of staging “Running” was considered four times at Politburo meetings. The authorities did not allow the second appearance of white officers on the stage. Since the writer did not listen to the leader’s advice, the play was first staged only in 1957 and not on the capital’s stage, but in Stalingrad.

1929, the year of Stalin’s “great turning point,” broke the fates not only of the peasantry, but also of any “individual peasants” still remaining in the country. At this time, all of Bulgakov's plays were removed from the stage. In desperation, Bulgakov sent a letter to the government on March 28, 1930, which spoke of “deep skepticism regarding the revolutionary process” taking place in backward Russia, and admitted that “he had not even attempted to compose a communist play.” At the end of the letter, filled with genuine civic courage, there was an urgent request: either to be allowed to go abroad, or to be given a job, otherwise “poverty, the street and death.”

His new play was called "The Cabal of the Holy One" (1929). At its center is a collision: the artist and power. The play about Moliere and his unfaithful patron Louis XIV was lived by the writer from the inside. The king, who highly values ​​the art of Moliere, nevertheless deprives the patronage of the playwright, who dared to ridicule the members of the religious organization “Society of the Holy Gifts” in the comedy “Tartuffe”. The play (called “Molière”) was rehearsed at the Moscow Art Theater for six years and at the beginning of 1936 it appeared on the stage, only to be removed from the repertoire after seven performances. Bulgakov never saw any of his plays on the theater stage.

The result of the appeal to the government was the transformation of a free writer into an employee of the Moscow Art Theater (the writer was not released abroad, despite the fact that at the same time another dissident writer Evgeniy Ivanovich Zamyatin was allowed to leave). Bulgakov was accepted into the Moscow Art Theater as an assistant director, assisting in the production of his own adaptation of Gogol’s “Dead Souls.” At night he writes a “novel about the devil” (this is how Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel about “The Master and Margarita” was originally seen). At the same time, an inscription appeared in the margins of the manuscript: “Finish before you die.” The novel was already recognized by the author as the main work of his life.

In 1931, Bulgakov completed the utopia “Adam and Eve,” a play about a future gas war, as a result of which only a handful of people remained alive in the fallen Leningrad: the fanatical communist Adam Krasovsky, whose wife, Eve, goes to the scientist Efrosimov, who managed to create the apparatus , exposure to which saves from death; fiction writer Donut-Nepobeda, creator of the novel “Red Greens”; the charming hooligan Marquisov, devouring books like Gogol's Petrushka. Biblical reminiscences, Efrosimov’s risky assertion that all theories are worth one another, as well as the pacifist motives of the play led to the fact that “Adam and Eve” was also not staged during the writer’s lifetime.

In the mid-1930s, Bulgakov also wrote the drama “The Last Days” (1935), a play about Pushkin without Pushkin, and the comedy “Ivan Vasilyevich” (1934-1936) about the formidable tsar and the foolish house manager, due to an error in the operation of the time machine changed centuries; the utopia "Bliss" (1934) about a sterile and ominous future with ironically planned desires of people; finally, a dramatization of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” (1938), which under the pen of Bulgakov turned into an independent play.

Mikhail Bulgakov chose the most difficult path: the path of a person who firmly delineates the boundaries of his own, individual existence, aspirations, plans and does not intend to obediently follow the rules and canons imposed from outside. In the 1930s, Bulgakov's dramaturgy was just as unacceptable for censorship as his prose had been before. In totalitarian Russia, the themes and plots of the playwright, his thoughts and his characters are impossible. “Over the last seven years I have made 16 things, and all of them died, except one, and that was a dramatization of Gogol! It would be naive to think that the 17th or 18th will go,” Bulgakov writes on October 5, 1937 to Vikenty Vikentievich Veresaev.

"Master and Margarita"

But “there is no such writer that he should shut up. If he fell silent, then he was not real,” these are the words of Bulgakov himself (from a letter to Stalin on May 30, 1931). And the real writer Mikhail Bulgakov continues to work. The crowning achievement of his creative career was the novel “The Master and Margarita,” which brought the writer posthumous world fame.

The novel was originally conceived as an apocryphal “gospel of the devil,” and the future title characters were absent from the first editions of the text. Over the years, the original plan became more complex and transformed, incorporating the fate of the writer himself. Later, the woman who became his third wife entered the novel - Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (they met in 1929, the marriage was formalized in the fall of 1932). A lonely writer (Master) and his faithful girlfriend (Margarita) will become no less important than the central characters in the world history of mankind.

The story of Satan's presence in Moscow in the 1930s echoes the legend of the appearance of Jesus two millennia ago. Just as they once did not recognize God, Muscovites do not recognize the devil, although Woland does not hide his well-known signs. Moreover, Woland meets seemingly enlightened heroes: the writer, editor of the anti-religious magazine Berlioz and the poet, author of the poem about Christ Ivan Bezrodny.

The events took place in front of many people and yet remained misunderstood. And only the Master, in the novel he created, is given the opportunity to restore the meaningfulness and unity of the flow of history. With the creative gift of experience, the Master “guesses” the truth in the past. The accuracy of the penetration into historical reality, witnessed by Woland, thereby confirms the accuracy and adequacy of the Master’s description of the present. Following Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", Bulgakov's novel can be called, by well-known definition, an encyclopedia of Soviet life. The life and customs of new Russia, human types and characteristic actions, clothing and food, methods of communication and occupations of people - all this is unfolded before the reader with deadly irony and at the same time piercing lyricism in the panorama of several May days.

Mikhail Bulgakov builds The Master and Margarita as a “novel within a novel.” Its action takes place in two times: in Moscow in the 1930s, where Satan appears to arrange the traditional spring full moon ball, and in the ancient city of Yershalaim, in which the trial of the “wandering philosopher” Yeshua takes place by the Roman procurator Pilate. The modern and historical author of the novel about Pontius Pilate, the Master, connects both plots.

In the years when the national point of view on what was happening was asserted as “the only correct one,” Bulgakov came out with a distinctly subjective view of the events of world history, contrasting the members of the “writing collective” (MASSOLIT) with a lonely creator. It is no coincidence that the cast “ancient chapters” of the novel, telling the story of the death of Yeshua, are introduced by the writer as a truth revealed to an individual, as a personal comprehension of the Master.

The novel revealed the writer’s deep interest in issues of faith, religious or atheistic worldview. Connected by origin with a family of clergy, albeit in its “scientific” book version (Mikhail’s father is not a “father”, but a learned cleric), throughout his life Bulgakov seriously reflected on the problem of attitude towards religion, which in the thirties became closed to public discussion. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov brings to the fore the creative personality in the tragic 20th century, affirming, following Pushkin, the independence of man, his historical responsibility.

Bulgakov the artist

All the artistic features of Bulgakov’s work are aimed at developing the reader’s own attitude to what is happening. Almost every writer's work begins with a riddle, which is designed to destroy the previous clarity. Thus, in “The Master and Margarita” Bulgakov deliberately gives the characters unconventional names: Satan - Woland, Jerusalem - Yershalaim, he calls the eternal enemy of the devil not Jesus, but Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The reader must independently, without relying on what is generally known, penetrate into the essence of what is happening and seem to relive in his mind the central episodes of the world history of mankind: the trial of Pilate, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

In Bulgakov’s works, the time of the present, the momentary, is necessarily correlated with the time of the “big” history of mankind, the “blue corridor of millennia.” In “The Master and Margarita” the technique is deployed throughout the entire space of the text. Thus, the current momentary values ​​of the Soviet era are called into question and reveal their obvious transience and dubiousness.

Mikhail Bulgakov is characterized by another feature: his hero, whether in prose or drama, is returned by the author to the origins of fate. And Moliere still does not know the scale of his genius (“The Cabal of the Holy One”), and Pushkin’s poetry (“The Last Days”) is generally considered weaker than Benedict’s, and even Yeshua wanders, afraid of pain, does not feel omnipotent and immortal. The judgment of history has not yet been completed. Time unfolds, bringing with it opportunities for change. Probably, it was precisely this feature of Bulgakov’s poetics that made it impossible to stage “Batum” (1939), written as a drama not about an omnipotent ruler, but about one of many whose fate had not yet taken final shape. Finally, in Bulgakov’s works there are only two options for endings: either the thing ends with the death of the main character, or the ending remains open. The writer offers a model of the world in which there are countless possibilities. And the right to choose an action remains with the actor. Thus, the author helps the reader to feel like the creator of his own destiny. And the life of a country is made up of many individual destinies. The idea of ​​a free and historically responsible person, “sculpting” the present and future in his own image and likeness, proposed by the writer Bulgakov, is a precious testament to his entire creative life.

"Batum"

“Batum” was the last play by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (originally it was called “The Shepherd”). Theaters were preparing for Stalin's 60th birthday. Considering the months needed to get a particularly important thing through censorship, as well as for rehearsals, the search for authors for the anniversary began back in 1937. After urgent requests from the Moscow Art Theater directorate, Bulgakov began working on a play about the leader. Refusing a flattering order was dangerous. But Bulgakov takes an unconventional path here too: he does not write about the all-powerful leader, like the authors of other anniversary works, but talks about Dzhugashvili’s youth, starting the play with his expulsion from the seminary. Then he takes the hero through humiliation, prison and exile, that is, he turns the dictator into an ordinary dramatic character, treating the biography of the leader as material subject to free creative implementation. After reviewing the play, Stalin banned its production.

A few weeks after the news of the ban on Batum, in the fall of 1939, Bulgakov suffered from sudden blindness: a symptom of the same kidney disease from which his father died. The will of a terminally ill writer only postpones death, which occurs six months later. Almost everything the writer did was still waiting in the wings on his desk for more than a quarter of a century: the novel “The Master and Margarita,” the stories “The Heart of a Dog” and “The Life of Monsieur de Molière” (1933), as well as 16 that were never published during the writer’s lifetime. plays. After the publication of the “sunset novel,” Bulgakov will become one of the artists who defined the face of the 20th century with their creativity. This is how Woland’s prophecy addressed to the Master will come true: “Your novel will bring you more surprises.”

Since February 1940, friends and relatives were constantly on duty at M. Bulgakov’s bedside. On March 10, 1940, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov died. On March 11, a civil memorial service took place in the building of the Union of Soviet Writers. Before the funeral service, Moscow sculptor S. D. Merkurov removed the death mask from M. Bulgakov’s face.

M. Bulgakov is buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. At his grave, at the request of his wife E. S. Bulgakova, a stone was installed, nicknamed “Golgotha,” which previously lay on the grave of N. V. Gogol.

In 1966, the magazine “Moscow” began publishing the novel “The Master and Margarita” for the first time in banknotes. This happened thanks to the titanic efforts of the writer’s widow E. S. Bulgakova and the effective support of Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov. And from then on the triumphant march of the novel began. In 1973, the first complete edition of the novel appeared in the writer’s homeland; in the mid-1980s, the novel was published abroad, where it was published by the American publishing house Ardis. And only in the 1980s, the works of the outstanding Russian writer finally began to appear in Russia one after another.

Bulgakov Mikhail Afanasyevich needs no introduction. This great prose writer and playwright is known throughout the world. Mikhail Afanasyevich is presented in this article.

Origin of the writer

Bulgakov M. A. was born on May 3, 1891 in the city of Kyiv. His parents were representatives of the intelligentsia. Mother worked as a teacher at the Karachay gymnasium. My father was a teacher (his portrait is presented above). After graduation, he worked there, as well as in other educational institutions. In 1893, Afanasy Bulgakov became the Kyiv regional censor. His duties included censorship of works written in foreign languages. In addition to Mikhail, the family had five more children.

Training period, work in field hospitals

The biography of such an author as Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov should be examined in great detail. A table of dates associated with his life will be of little help to those who set out to find the origins of his work and understand the features of his inner world. Therefore, we invite you to read the detailed biography.

The future writer studied at the First Alexander Gymnasium. The level of education in this educational institution was very high. In 1909, Mikhail Afanasyevich entered Kiev University, after which he was to become a physician. In 1914, the First World War began.

After graduating from the university in 1916, Mikhail Afanasyevich worked in (in Kamenets-Podolsky, and after some time - in Cherepovtsy). He was recalled from the front in September 1916. Bulgakov became the head of the Nikolskaya rural hospital, located in A year later, in 1917, Mikhail Afanasyevich was transferred to Vyazma. This period of his life was reflected in “Notes of a Young Doctor,” created in 1926. The main character of the work is a talented doctor, a conscientious worker. In seemingly hopeless situations, he saves the sick. The hero is acutely aware of the difficult financial situation of uneducated peasants living in Smolensk villages. However, he understands that he cannot change anything.

Revolution in the fate of Bulgakov

The usual life of Mikhail Afanasyevich was disrupted by the February Revolution. Bulgakov expressed his attitude towards her in his 1923 essay "Kyiv-City". He noted that “suddenly and menacingly” with the revolution “history came.”

Upon graduation, Bulgakov was released from military service. He returned to his native Kyiv, which, unfortunately, was soon occupied by the Germans. Here Mikhail Afanasyevich plunged into the maelstrom of the Civil War. Bulgakov was a very good doctor, so both sides needed his services. The young doctor remained faithful to the ideals of humanism in all situations. Gradually, indignation grew in his soul. He could not come to terms with the cruelty of the Whites and Petliurists. Subsequently, these sentiments were reflected in Bulgakov’s novel “The White Guard,” as well as in his stories “On the Night of the Third,” “Raid,” and in the plays “Running” and “Days of the Turbins.”

Bulgakov honestly fulfilled his duty as a doctor. During his service, he had to be an involuntary witness to the crimes that were committed at the end of 1919 in Vladikavkaz. Mikhail Afanasyevich no longer wanted to participate in the war. He left the ranks of Denikin's army at the beginning of 1920.

First articles and stories

After this, Mikhail Afanasyevich decided not to engage in medicine anymore; he continues to work as a journalist. He began writing articles that were published in local newspapers. Bulgakov completed his first story in the fall of 1919. That same winter he created several feuilletons and a number of short stories. In one of them, called “Tribute of Admiration,” Mikhail Afanasyevich talks about the street clashes that took place in Kyiv during the revolution and the Civil War.

Plays created in Vladikavkaz

Shortly before the Whites left Vladikavkaz, Mikhail Afanasyevich fell ill with relapsing fever during this time, which was especially dramatic. In the spring of 1920 he recovered. However, Red Army detachments had already entered the city, and Bulgakov was unable to emigrate, which he really wanted. It was necessary to somehow build relations with the new regime. Then he began to collaborate with the Revolutionary Committee, in the arts department. Mikhail Afanasyevich created plays for Ingush and Ossetian troupes. These works reflected his views on the revolution. These were one-day propaganda pieces, written mainly for the purpose of surviving in difficult conditions. Bulgakov's story "Notes on Cuffs" reflected his Vladikavkaz impressions.

Moving to Moscow, new works

In Tiflis, and then in Batumi, Mikhail Bulgakov could emigrate. His biography, however, took a different path. Bulgakov understood that the place of a writer in difficult times for the country is next to the people. The biography of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov in 1921 is marked by his move to Moscow. Since the spring of 1922, his articles were regularly published on the pages of magazines and newspapers in this city. The essays and satirical pamphlets reflected the main signs of life in the post-revolutionary years. The main object of Bulgakov's satire was the “NEP scum” (in other words, the nouveau riche NEPmen). Here it is necessary to note such short stories by Mikhail Afanasyevich as “The Cup of Life” and “The Trillionaire”. He was also interested in representatives of the population with a low level of culture: market traders, residents of communal apartments in Moscow, bureaucratic employees, etc. However, Mikhail Afanasyevich also noticed new phenomena in the life of the country. So, in one of his essays, he depicted a symbol of new trends in the face of a schoolboy walking down the street with a brand new backpack.

The story "Fatal Eggs" and features of creativity of the 1920s

Bulgakov's story "Fatal Eggs" was published in 1924. Its action takes place in an imaginary near future - in 1928. By this time, the results of the NEP were already obvious. In particular, the standard of living of the population increased sharply (in the story created by Mikhail Bulgakov). The writer’s biography does not imply a detailed acquaintance with his work, but we will still retell the plot of the work “Fatal Eggs” in a nutshell. Professor Persikov made an important discovery that could greatly benefit all of humanity. However, falling into the hands of self-confident, semi-literate people, representatives of the new bureaucracy that flourished under War Communism and strengthened its position during the NEP years, this discovery turns into a tragedy. Almost all the heroes of Bulgakov's stories, created in the 1920s, fail. In his work, the writer strives to convey to the reader the idea that society is not ready to learn new ways of relationships that are based on respect for knowledge and culture, and hard work.

"Running" and "Days of the Turbins"

In Bulgakov's plays "Running" and "Days of the Turbins" (1925-28), Mikhail Afanasyevich showed that all the authorities that succeeded each other during the Civil War were hostile to the intelligentsia. The heroes of these works are typical representatives of the so-called “new intelligentsia”. At first they were either wary of the revolution or fought against it. M.A. Bulgakov also considered himself to be part of this new layer. He spoke about this with humor in his feuilleton entitled “The Capital in a Notebook.” In it, he noted that a new intelligentsia, “iron,” had emerged. She is capable of chopping wood, loading furniture, and doing x-rays. Bulgakov noted that he believes that she will survive and will not perish.

Attacks on Bulgakov, call from Stalin

It must be said that Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (his biography and work confirm this) was always sensitive to changes in Soviet society. He experienced the triumph of injustice very hard and doubted the justification of certain measures. However, Bulgakov always believed in man. His heroes worried and doubted with him. Critics did not take it kindly. Attacks on Bulgakov intensified in 1929. All of his plays were excluded from theater repertoires. Finding himself in a difficult situation, Mikhail Afanasyevich was forced to write a letter to the government with a request to go abroad. After this, the biography of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was marked by an important event. In 1930, Bulgakov received a call from Stalin himself. The result of this conversation was the appointment of Mikhail Afanasyevich to the position of assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater. Productions of his plays again appeared on theater stages. After some time, the biography of such a writer as Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was noted for the staging of “Dead Souls” he created. His life seemed to be getting better. However, everything was not so simple...

Bulgakov - banned author

Despite Stalin’s external patronage, not a single work by Mikhail Afanasyevich appeared in the Soviet press after 1927, with the exception of an excerpt from the play “Running” (“The Seventh Dream”) in 1932 and a translation of Molière’s “The Miser” in 1938. The case is that Bulgakov was included in the list of prohibited authors.

What else is remarkable about the biography of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov? It is not easy to briefly talk about him, because his life was marked by many important events and interesting facts. It is worth saying that, despite all the difficulties, the writer did not think of leaving his homeland. Even during the most difficult period (1929-30), thoughts of emigration practically never occurred to him. In one of his letters, Bulgakov admitted that it was impossible anywhere else except the USSR, since for eleven years he drew inspiration from it.

Novel "The Master and Margarita"

Mikhail Afanasyevich in 1933 tried to publish his work in the “ZhZL” series. However, he failed again. After this, he made no further attempts to publish his creations until his death. The writer devoted himself entirely to creating the novel "The Master and Margarita". This work became his greatest achievement, as well as one of the best works of Russian and world literature of the 20th century. Mikhail Afanasyevich devoted twelve years of his life to working on it. The idea for “The Master and Margarita” appeared in his mind back in the late 1920s as an attempt at a philosophical and artistic understanding of socialist reality. The author considered the first versions of the work unsuccessful. Over the course of a number of years, Mikhail Afanasyevich constantly returned to the characters, trying on new conflicts and scenes. Only in 1932 did this work, the author of which is known to everyone (Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov), acquire plot completion.

A full biography of Bulgakov involves consideration of the question of the significance of his work. Therefore, we will talk about this too.

The significance of Bulgakov's creativity

Having shown that the white movement is doomed to defeat, that the intelligentsia will certainly go over to the side of the reds (the novel "The White Guard", the plays "Running" and "Days of the Turbins"), that society is in danger if a culturally and morally backward person has the right to impose on others his will (“Heart of a Dog”), Mikhail Afanasyevich made a discovery that became part of the system of national values ​​of our country.

What else is interesting about Bulgakov Mikhail Afanasyevich? Biography, interesting facts related to him, and his work - everything bears the stamp of pain for the person. This feeling was invariably characteristic of Bulgakov as a continuer of the traditions of domestic and world literature. Mikhail Afanasyevich accepted only that literature that shows the suffering of real heroes. Humanism was the ideological core of Bulgakov's works. And the true humanism of a true master is always close and dear to the reader.

last years of life

In the last years of his life, Mikhail Afanasyevich had the feeling that his creative destiny was ruined. Despite the fact that he continued to actively create, they practically did not reach contemporary readers. This broke Mikhail Afanasyevich. His illness worsened, leading to early death. Bulgakov died in Moscow on March 10, 1940. This ended the biography of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, but his work is immortal. The remains of the writer rest in the Novodevichy cemetery.

The biography of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, briefly outlined in this article, we hope, has made you want to take a closer look at his work. The works of this author are very interesting and important, so they are definitely worth reading. Mikhail Bulgakov, whose biography and work is studied at school, is one of the greatest Russian writers.