Mikhail Bulgakov

This is the full, post-glasnost critical biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), a great comic writer whose works are now regarded as modern classics both in the Soviet Union and in the West. It is only very recently that all Bulgakov's works have been published in the Soviet Union, where his literary rehabilitation is regarded as an important barometer of glasnost. A flood of hitherto concealed biographical information has also emerged. This account of Bulgakov's career as playwright and prose-writer makes full use of these new sources. It examines all his works in the context of the changing demands put upon artists in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, who were faced with the choice of integrity at the price of silence, or publication and production at the price of conformism with the totalitarian state. Lesley Milne traces through Bulgakov's career an ethical concept of the writer's role, his response to his time, and his search for an audience in and beyond that time.