![]() ![]() He received commissions for and wrote plays-and directors like Konstantin Stanislawski and Vsevolod Meyerhold begged to work on them-only to be barred from performance. Yet after his first success, the play The Day of the Turbins, he published or produced little else, and from his letters, his notes, and his wife’s diary, we can witness the heartbreak this silence engendered. It has been cited as the inspiration for The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”Īnd while many focus on Bulgakov’s posthumous triumph, the examination of his entire career raises another pressing question: Faced with constant censorship and artistic oppression, why did he continue to write? Over the span of two decades, he wrote dozens of short stories, four novels, and ten plays. It has been translated into every major world language and rendered in countless film and television and stage productions. Only in 1973 was it published in its entirety. Heavily censored, The Master and Margarita first appeared in serialized form in 19. His widow, who was the inspiration for his Margarita, recognized the inherent danger of his satirical portrayal of Soviet bureaucracy and hid the manuscript until after the death of Stalin. He’d spent his last 12 years working on a novel in secret- The Master and Margarita. ![]() But his life as a writer in Moscow from the early 1920s until 1940 was replete with informants and searches, censorship and secrecy, until it ended suddenly and tragically at the age of 49. However, it's not possible to date the timeline of the Moscow part of the novel.Before his death at a Siberian transit camp in 1938, Osip Mandelstam famously uttered, “Only in Russia is poetry respected-it gets people killed.” Today, Mikhail Bulgakov is one of the most iconic Russian authors. ![]() Barkov believes that the year of Gorky's death (1936) is the time of the events in the "Master and Margarita". Īccording to Barkov, one of Master's prototypes was Maxim Gorky - the most well-known proletarian writer. Most scholars find the Master character hugely autobiographical: Mikhail Bulgakov burnt the first variant of his novel, and even after rewriting it, he realized that it was next to impossible to publish such an unorthodox book in the USSR.Īlfred Barkov offers an alternative interpretation of the Master character: "the ominous meaning (of the term "master" ) becomes evident if you realize that the System used it to define the writers who were ready to choke their ambitions and create something that it wants". In the case of Bulgakov's character, Master opposes the socialist realism. In both Russian and world literature Master became the epitome of the artist, the author, who opposes the official culture of his time. In the novel his name is written without capitalizing the first letter. His own answer to the question is: "I don't have a last name". He gets back the burnt manuscript and gives the Master and his beloved Margarita a place for eternal serenity and retreat. Woland became interested in the story of the Master's novel. After the investigation Master was freed but, having nowhere to live, no money and no purpose in life, he decided to find refuge in a mental hospital. The same newspaper criticisms gave one of the Master's acquaintances, Aloiziy Mogarych, the idea to write a false report to the authorities to seize Master's apartment. After a lot of harassment he gradually went mad and at the moment of despair burned his novel. His first attempt to publish it, however, caused a barrage of criticism from professional writers in the press. Master is a Muscovite, a former historian and a highly educated person who speaks several foreign languages.Īfter winning a large sum of money in the lottery he decided to fully dedicate himself to writing a novel about Pontius Pilate and the last days in life of Yeshua Ha-Nozri. Master (Russian: Ма́стер) is a fictional character from the novel The Master and Margarita by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov. ![]()
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