The Moscow in which Bulgakov settled in September 1921 was a city exhausted by seven years of political and social turmoil. The three years of fighting in World War I that preceded the February and October revolutions of 1917 had already taken a considerable toll on the country. Civil war in various forms then meant that fighting continued until 1921 along a whole range of fronts: against the White Tsarist forces; against nationalist insurrections; and against foreign intervention. Meanwhile, other battles were also being fought, apart from the specifically military operations conducted by the Red Army. During these years attempts to retain alternative political groupings were suppressed, leaving the Bolsheviks’ Communist Party under Lenin in effective dictatorial control. The Party’s dictatorship had been proclaimed in the name of the proletariat, but when representatives of these working classes, or indeed of the soldiers and sailors who had supported the October Revolution, began to express doubts about the Bolsheviks’ undemocratic methods, they too had to be quashed – as, for example, in the brutal suppression of the rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base by Marshal Tukhachevsky in March 1921.
There was also the problem of the peasants, who soon discovered that the promises of more land and bread were translated in reality into the forcible requisitioning of their crops for the cities, and the forbidding of any kind of market trading that might enable them to prosper. The peasantry responded with uprisings, and eventually by withdrawing from participation in anything much beyond subsistence farming. The cost of final victory for the Bolsheviks in 1921, then, was terrible famine and a catastrophic drop in industrial production, in a country over which they had now achieved more or less complete control, and for which they therefore carried complete responsibility. Faced with a grave crisis which threatened to sweep away all the Bolsheviks’ hard-won achievements, Lenin decided to introduce what was to become known as the New Economic Policy (NEP): grain-requisitioning would cease, and as a consequence a considerable amount of private trading would have to be allowed again, not just in agriculture but also in consumer goods, although heavy industry, banking and foreign trade would remain under State control.
When Bulgakov arrived in Moscow in September 1921, NEP – which was in fact pursued for seven years, until it was replaced by the first Five-Year Plan in 1928 – was still coming into force. Numerous State-run organizations were being closed down, including the Literary Section of the Department of Culture where Bulgakov obtained his very first job in Moscow, and being replaced by private enterprises governed by market forces. In a long letter sent to his mother in November 1921 Bulgakov writes of the bleak prospects for the winter of 1921–22, which he and his wife Tasya spent struggling to subsist against difficult odds. Had they not been given the opportunity to live in a room rented to Bulgakov’s brother-in-law, Nadya’s husband Andrey Zemsky, they might well not have survived. Bulgakov cordially detested living with a dozen or more other people in this communal apartment at number 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, where once again he was forced to confront the ignorance and the lack of culture of the Russian people at large. He was to write a number of angry satirical sketches about drunks, wife-beaters and other loutish characters in the setting of a communal apartment much like the one he inhabited.
But that winter Bulgakov was also confronted with much more urgent problems, of how he and Tasya were to eat and how they could remain adequately clothed. He no longer had the advantages of his background in Kiev, which had permitted him a relatively secure, if modest, lifestyle. In Moscow, with the return to private trading, there was a conspicuous re-emergence of the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle for some, with furs, good food, jewellery and smart cafés; and these people, whose prosperity aroused fury amongst those who thought the Revolution had done away with such social inequalities, came to be known as NEP-men. For others, however, such as Bulgakov, who had arrived in Moscow empty-handed, the struggle to survive was an all-consuming task; and he could only contemplate the smug satisfaction of the NEP-men with a distaste tinged with envy. The other marked consequence of the reintroduction of private trading was galloping inflation; in his letters Bulgakov refers to the two different currency rates in force during this period, one of them counted in tens of roubles, the other eventually in tens of millions of roubles. The letters he wrote to his relatives provide a unique record of the early days of NEP, offering not just statistics about inflation and the price of bread, for example, but also a striking impression of the feverish pace of life in Moscow.
Bulgakov’s multifarious endeavours to scratch an income together took him for the most part into journalistic work. Writing for the Trade and Industry Herald provided some sort of security for a brief period, although the newspaper soon went bankrupt. Bulgakov picked up whatever casual work was going: he seems to have hoped for some sort of job connected with the flax industry, tried working as a compère and joined a group of actors, and through Andrey Zemsky’s brother Boris he also did some work for a Scientific and Technical Committee associated with the Air Force. But all the time he was pushing ahead at night with the writing of his own works, determined to succeed in the world of literature. He considered an idea for a play, which he never actually wrote, on the subject of Tsar Nicholas II and the murder of the priest Rasputin in 1916, but for the most part he was developing his writing skills in the realm of narrative prose. After his five Vladikavkaz plays, the period from 1921 to 1925 shows Bulgakov concerned almost exclusively with this form, while the subsequent phase, from 1925 to 1929, would once again be dominated by drama.
In an important move towards establishing himself specifically as a writer of fiction rather than a current-affairs journalist, he joined the staff of two newspapers with contracts to write humorous sketches for them. The first of these contracts was with a Berlin-based publication called On the Eve, which was set up in 1922 by the émigré community to re-establish some contact with the Soviet Union and with the Bolshevik government. The latter welcomed the initiative, since the philosophy of the newspaper was that, whether or not one sympathized with Marxism-Leninism, the de facto authority of the Bolsheviks had to be recognized as the only force capable of governing the country. A number of writers who had emigrated because of the Bolshevik Revolution began to return to the USSR during these years, including the novelist Aleksey Tolstoy, whom Bulgakov later came to dislike intensely on account of his role as an apologist for Stalin. That Bulgakov still regarded the Bolsheviks with the scorn he had shown for them in his 1919 article ‘Prospects for the Future’ is very evident from his diaries of the early 1920s, which also suggest that he found the naïvely pro-Soviet attitudes of those associated with On the Eve increasingly unpalatable. Between 1922 and 1924 Bulgakov wrote about twenty-five pieces for On the Eve, some of them quite substantial, and some of them carrying the seeds of more extended works for the future. He also nourished hopes that the publishing section of On the Eve in Berlin would publish his autobiographical Cuff-notes, although in the end they failed to keep their promise to do so. In many of the sketches published in the newspaper, however, his principal aim was to give a light-hearted impression to his readership in Berlin and at home of the way Moscow was developing, and of the crazy atmosphere under NEP.
The other newspaper Bulgakov worked for was a very different publication altogether – The Hooter, which was the official organ of the Railway Workers’ Union. Nevertheless, it attracted some of the most distinguished authors of the day to write comic pieces for its back page, and many of the contributors who got to know one another through working for the newspaper went on to become important figures in Moscow’s literary circles during the 1920s. These writers included Isaak Babel, Yury Olyesha, Valentin Katayev and the duo of Ilf and Petrov. Bulgakov’s speciality was the concocting of absurd short letters, purportedly sent in by simple-minded readers, about the effects of the introduction of NEP or about life in the depths of the provinces. Between 1923 and 1926 Bulgakov wrote over a hundred of these miniatures. He once confessed, ‘Let me just reveal a secret here: the composition of a seventy-five or hundred-line sketch used to take, if you include time for smoking and whistling, from eighteen to twenty minutes. Then getting it typed up, if you include time for having a giggle with the typist – eight minutes. So all in all, the whole thing could be wrapped up in half an hour.’ Although in later years he was to bemoan the time he had wasted at The Hooter, which he would rather have spent on more serious writing, many of these little vignettes are very witty, and display his characteristically sharp ear for dialogue.
By 1922, Bulgakov was beginning to consolidate his position in Moscow, and was energetically establishing himself in literary society. After he had been to listen to a lecture given by Vikenty Veresayev, the author of medical tales similar to his own stories in A Country Doctor’s Notebook, Bulgakov went to call on him. Veresayev befriended him and did much to assist him in the early 1920s. In 1922 Bulgakov also published an announcement that he was collecting information on modern writers for a biographical dictionary; later he was listed as one of the authors for a projected collective novel. Although neither of these projects came to anything, they reflect Bulgakov’s eagerness to make a name for himself. He attended the meetings of a number of literary clubs, and he was an avid reader of contemporary Russian literature. Such involvement presents a contrast to his behaviour once he had become established as a writer, when he participated as little as possible in the literary life of his contemporaries.
And all the while, Bulgakov was writing. Between 1921 and 1925, besides his journalistic sketches, he wrote several important works, including the autobiographical Cuff-notes, which humorously retraces his first steps in literature in Vladikavkaz and his early months in Moscow. The nineteenth-century master of the grotesque, Nikolay Gogol, who was one of the authors Bulgakov most admired, provided him with the inspiration for Diaboliada and The Adventures of Chichikov. Both are reworkings in a Soviet setting of classic Gogolian subjects, the former being concerned with the concept of the double, and the latter with Chichikov, the scoundrelly but endearing hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls. The Fateful Eggs is a science-fiction nightmare in the manner of H. G. Wells, about an experiment that goes horribly wrong and unleashes monsters to ravage Russia, while The Heart of a Dog is a brilliant fantasy about a medical experiment to transplant the organs of a dead man into a good-tempered mongrel, which results in the creation of an appalling new proletarian man with criminal tendencies, a garbled devotion to Communism and a fondness for chasing cats. This latter tale was quite rightly read as a satire on the claims made by Marxist ideology that a new kind of man would be created by Communism, and it was deemed unsuitable for publication by the Soviet authorities for sixty-two years after it was written in 1925.
The documents in this chapter give no more than a glimpse of the endless negotiations Bulgakov entered into for the publication of his works, almost all of which ended in failure. His major achievement during his early years in Moscow was the completion of his novel The White Guard, referred to at earlier stages as The Yellow Banner. The publication of the first part of the novel at the end of December 1924, together with the publication by the Nedra publishing house in 1925 of five of Bulgakov’s stories under the collective title Diaboliada, seemed to prove that Bulgakov had finally achieved his goal of becoming an established writer. What he could not have foreseen was that the publication of The White Guard would be interrupted and never completed, because of the closing down of the journal Rossiya by the Soviet authorities; nor could he ever have imagined that, with almost all of his finest writing still to come, these were the last publications of any significance he would see in his lifetime.
The years from 1921 to 1925 also witnessed great changes in Bulgakov’s personal life. His first letters to Nadya, who was back in Kiev with Andrey Zemsky while Bulgakov and Tasya were occupying their room in Moscow, bespeak Bulgakov’s comfortable relationship with his sister. He writes affectionately, and with concern for her well-being, but also with a brotherly briskness when it comes to trying to help himself and her by getting her to be his newspaper’s Kiev correspondent. His letter of November 1921 to his mother suggests the closeness of their relationship also, and he must have shared her delight at the news which finally reached Kiev early in 1922 that his brother Nikolay, who had not been heard of since 1919, was safe and sound in Yugoslavia. Tragically, however, by the time news reached Kiev a couple of months later that her youngest son Ivan was also safe and living abroad, Bulgakov’s mother was no longer alive. She had gone down with typhus at the end of January 1922, and died very shortly afterwards. This was an enormous blow to Bulgakov’s sense of the security of his home background, and the letters he wrote to his siblings in the following year or so are filled with concern that they should maintain the harmony created by their mother, forget whatever differences have divided them, and rebuild a happy household which is to include their stepfather, Ivan Pavlovich Voskresensky – whom all the Bulgakov children evidently held in great respect and affection. The opening of The White Guard, with its scene of the Turbins’ mother’s funeral and burial alongside their long-dead father, takes on an added poignancy in the light of the knowledge that Bulgakov added this passage to the text in the course of its composition; in real life, he had been unable to get to Kiev to attend his mother’s funeral.
Bulgakov’s marriage was meanwhile once again suffering from the tensions that seem to have threatened it during 1919– 1921. Once the most difficult first year in Moscow was past and he began to make his way in the literary world, it seems that the new sophisticated Bulgakov no longer found his wife Tatyana an adequate companion. Her own accounts of the growing gulf in their marriage suggest that she was very much left at home to run the household while he was busily earning a living – and also becoming caught up in a new circle of friends. He seems to have acquired something of a reputation as a flirt, in any case; and then, early in 1924, he met at a party a woman called Lyubov Yevgenyevna Belozerskaya (1894–1987). She had recently returned to Moscow from emigration, along with a number of other people who had fled the country after the Revolution, but who had now come back in the expectation that things had settled down. Lyubov Yevgenyevna had lived in Constantinople and Berlin, and had visited Paris, and was very vivacious and attractive.
Bulgakov, who for ever after is said to have felt he behaved very badly towards Tatyana Nikolayevna, persuaded his wife in April 1924 that they should get divorced: ‘You know, it just suits me to say that I am a bachelor. But don’t worry, everything’s the same as before; the divorce will simply be a formality.’ And indeed, for a while the couple continued to live together in Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. But during the summer of that year he arranged that they should move out of the noisy fifth-floor apartment into another, quieter apartment in the same block. Later Tatyana Nikolayevna was to realize that he had done this in order not to leave her in unpleasant surroundings; for meanwhile, it turned out, he was actively looking for somewhere to live with Lyubov Yevgenyevna. Late in November he suddenly announced that he was leaving for good, and moved in with Lyubov Yevgenyevna. Their marriage was officially registered some time later, on 30 April 1925. Tatyana Nikolayevna, who had few resources except a certain skill at hat-making, was left to fend pretty much for herself, although Bulgakov occasionally gave her some financial assistance. Apparently he felt so conscience-stricken about her that when he became gravely ill in 1940, he especially asked to see her in order to ask her forgiveness; but by that time Tatyana Nikolayevna was living in Siberia and could not be reached.
This rather more unattractive side of Bulgakov is revealed in the portions of his diaries that emerged from the KGB’s archives and were published for the first time in 1989–90. What has survived is evidently not the entire text of the original: the copy made by the OGPU’s typists appears to comprise a selection of those passages where Bulgakov specifically commented on political topics and current affairs. As an observer of the political scene, Bulgakov turns out to have been quite acute about the direction in which things were moving both inside Russia and in Europe: his comments, as early as 1923, on the way Europe seems to be sliding towards a division between a Communist and a Fascist camp show some prescience. Bulgakov deplores the fact that Curzon is able to humiliate the new Soviet government in 1923 by presenting them with an ultimatum concerning certain outstanding grievances; and he notes with concern the developments in the politics of the Orthodox Church, with the Patriarch Tikhon apparently capitulating to the faction known as the Living Church, which sought compromises with the Bolsheviks. Bulgakov also records with a certain malicious glee the rivalries within the Bolshevik leadership – although his prediction of the fall of Trotsky was to turn out to be a little premature. It is notable that Bulgakov, like many of his contemporaries, always tended to look upon Trotsky, the Commissar for the Red Army, as the driving force behind the Bolsheviks, rather than Lenin.
In these diaries Bulgakov is very frank, a foolishness which taught him a painful lesson when the diaries were confiscated, and which he never indulged in again; amongst other things, they contain traces of a condescension towards Jews which has caused some dismay amongst his present-day admirers. He is also candid when it comes to speaking about himself and his relationship with Lyubov Yevgenyevna, whom he describes as his ‘wife’ for some months before the official registration of their marriage. There is an unattractive irritation with himself that he should be so physically infatuated with her, and there is a hint of his doubts about the strength of her commitment to him, which seem to have led on occasion to his making scenes. Other memoirists have also hinted that he was capable of being very irascible. The diaries reveal, too, Bulgakov’s obsessive preoccupation with his health, which may be attributable to the fact that as a doctor he knew that there was always a danger he might succumb to the same disease as his father. He describes an attack of rheumatism in his knees as well as the recurrence of a swelling behind his ear, which had to be operated on more than once before he could be reassured that it was not a malignant growth. In addition, we can trace in the pages of the diaries the indications of a nervous susceptibility which would lead in due course, when his life really became difficult, to bouts of terror at being left alone and a fear of walking alone on the street. Overall, the image of Bulgakov that emerges from his diaries is not quite that of the cultivated man of letters he was to project in later years. In the early 1920s he writes as though he were much younger than his thirty-odd years; perhaps because he is starting out on a new career, he writes with some of the brash self-consciousness of a youth showing off about his dashing lifestyle and excessive drinking. What comes through most strongly, though, is his now obsessive ambition to achieve great success as a writer.
At the beginning of 1925, the portents were good: The White Guard was coming out in the journal Rossiya, the collection Diaboliada was in the pipeline, and Bulgakov was about to formalize his new marriage. And it was at this point, on 3 April 1925, that he received a letter that was to mark the beginning of a new phase in his life, a cryptic invitation to him to drop in at the Moscow Arts Theatre to discuss a matter that might prove of interest. This letter (page 62), which he would later make the starting-point of his Theatrical Novel, was to launch his career as one of Moscow’s most popular dramatists.
23 October 1921. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
My dear Nadya,
How are you? I haven’t written to you until now, because I was very tired. I kept putting off writing letters. How is your health? And how is Andrey? [ … ]
The jesting tone of my letter can be explained by the desire to drown out the horror that I feel at the thought of the coming winter. Still, the Lord God will not fail me. Maybe we’ll die, but maybe we won’t. I have masses of work, but it doesn’t mean much yet in actual fact. But maybe things will get better. I am concentrating all my energies, and am indeed achieving some tiny results.
I’ll write in more detail in the next letter. I really am very tired. You run around like a dog, and live on nothing but potatoes. [ … ]
I send you and Andrey a big kiss.
Tasya too.
Your loving Mikhail.
P.S. | Verses |
On Bolshaya Sadovaya Street
Stands a great block of apartments.
In the block live our brothers,
The organized proletariat.
And I was engulfed by the proletariat,
Just like, if you’ll pardon the expression, an atom.
It’s a shame that certain amenities are lacking,
The w … r-cl … t doesn’t work, for example.
The hand-basin is also cracking –
During the day it’s dry, at night it overflows on to the floor.
We eat what we can:
Potatoes and saccharin.
The electric light is of a strange brand –
First it’s flickering, then bright for no reason at all.
Just now, by the way, it’s been burning for several days non-stop.
And the proletariat is very glad.
Through the left wall a woman’s voice strikes up with ‘A poor seagull …’
While through the right wall they’re playing the balalaika …
9 November 1921. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
I will write briefly since I am in a great hurry. Nothing, absolutely nothing could compare with the effect produced by your two letters of 3 November. I immediately passed on to Boris your request about stocking up with potatoes. I had no intention of letting Andrey be taken off the housing register; on the contrary, I specifically stated that he lived here as well as us.
I still retain a small shadow of hope that before deciding on the horrors of moving back here, you will weigh up the state of Andrey’s health.
Take a careful look at him. I say this to you as a doctor.
Greetings to all. Tasya and I kiss you and Andrey.
Mikhail.
17 November 1921. From Moscow to Kiev
To his mother
Dear Mama,
How are you, how is your health? Please write as soon as you can find a free moment. Any news from the family is a pleasure, especially in the drudgery of my life at present.
I very much regret that in a short letter I cannot communicate to you a detailed picture of what Moscow is like at the moment. Briefly, I can say that a furious battle is going on for survival and to adapt to the new conditions of life. Having arrived six weeks ago in Moscow with just what I could carry, I have, it seems to me, achieved the maximum that it was possible to achieve in that time. I have a job. True, that is far from being the most important thing. You have to know how to get paid as well. And, can you imagine, I have achieved that as well. True, only on a tiny scale as yet. But all the same, Taska and I are already more or less managing to eat this month, we’ve stocked up with potatoes, she’s got her shoes mended, we’ve begun to buy firewood, and so on.
You have to work not just normally, but frenetically. From morning to night every day without a break. All Soviet institutions are being turned inside out and people are getting the chop. My organization is also to be axed, and is evidently living out its last days. So that very soon I will be without a job. But these are trifles. I have already undertaken steps so as not to be left behind and to move across to private-sector work in good time. You have probably already heard that it’s possible to survive in Moscow only through private enterprise or through trading. And my, so to speak, government post was worthwhile only inasmuch as I was able to be paid about one million for it last month. In government jobs they pay you stingily and in arrears, which is why it is impossible to go on living just with one such job any more.
I am making attempts to get work in the flax industry. Apart from that, yesterday I received an invitation on conditions that have as yet to be clarified to join a new industrial newspaper. It’s a real commercial enterprise, and they’re trying me out. Yesterday and today I was, so to speak, being tested. Tomorrow they should let me have an advance of half a million. That will mean that they like my work, and it’s possible that they will then let me take charge of their news items. And so, the flax, the industrial newspaper and whatever freelance work turns up, that’s what lies ahead. The course I marked out while I was in Kiev for finding work and pursuing my speciality [as a writer] turns out to have been the right one. It would be impossible to work with any other speciality. At best it would mean going hungry.
The end of November and December will be difficult, at the moment when I move over to private enterprise. But I am counting on the enormous number of my acquaintances, and now quite justifiably on the energy that I have had willy-nilly to display. I have a huge number of acquaintances in journalism, in the theatre and simply in business. That means a great deal in present-day Moscow, which is making the transition to a new kind of life such as it has not witnessed for a long time: savage competition, bustle, the need to show initiative and so on. It is impossible to live outside that life, you would simply perish. I have no wish to be among the number of those who perish.
Taska is looking for a job as a sales assistant, which is very difficult since the whole of Moscow is still naked and barefoot and is trading ephemerally; for the most part they’re using their own strengths and resources, and employing just their own people. Poor Taska is having to exert all her strength to grind rye using an axe-head, and to prepare meals out of all sorts of rubbish. But she’s doing very well! In other words we’re both engaged in a desperate struggle. The most important thing is to have a roof over our heads. Andrey’s room has been my salvation. With Nadya’s arrival, that question will become ominously complicated, of course. But I am not thinking about that as yet, because my day is already full of heavy cares as it is.
In Moscow they count only in hundreds of thousands or in millions. Black bread is 4,600 roubles a pound, white is 14,000. And the prices are rising and rising! The shops are full of goods, but what can you buy! The theatres are full, but yesterday as I was passing by the Bolshoy on business (I can no longer imagine how it would be possible to go anywhere not on business!) the touts were selling tickets for 75, 100 and 150 thousand roubles! In Moscow there is everything: shoes, cloth, meat, caviare, preserves, delicacies, everything! Cafés are opening, they’re sprouting like mushrooms. And everywhere hundreds of thousands of roubles, hundreds! Hundreds!! There is the buzzing of a wave of speculation.
I dream of just one thing: of surviving the winter, of not succumbing in December, which will be the hardest month, I reckon. Taska’s support is invaluable to me: given the enormous distances that I have to run around (literally) over the whole of Moscow, she saves me a great deal of energy and strength by feeding me and leaving for me to do only those things that she can really not do herself: chopping wood in the evening and fetching potatoes in the morning.
We both go around Moscow in our light coats. For that reason I somehow walk about sideways on (I don’t know why, my left side feels the draught more). I dream of getting Tatyana warm footwear. She hasn’t got a thing except her shoes.
But maybe we’ll survive! Just so long as we have a room and health!
I don’t know whether you are interested to have such a detailed description of Moscow, and whether it is sufficiently comprehensible to you in Kiev?
I am writing all this with the aim of showing you in what conditions I have had to realize my idée fixe. And that consists in re-establishing the norm within three years – an apartment, clothes, food and books. Whether I will succeed remains to be seen.
I won’t tell you, because you won’t believe it, how thrifty Taska and I have become. We cherish each and every log.
Such is the school of life.
At night I am writing The Notes of a Country Doctor [A Country Doctor’s Notebook] in snatches. It may be that something solid will come out of it. I am also working over The Ailment [the story Morphine]. But there’s no time, no time! That’s what I find painful!
For Nadya
A request: please tell Nadya (I don’t have the strength to write to her separately, I’m falling asleep!) that I need all the material for a historical drama – everything concerning Nicholas II and Rasputin in 1916 and 1917 (the murder and the seizure of power). Newspapers, a description of the palace, memoirs, and above all Purishkevich’s Diary – that’s crucial! A description of their clothes, portraits, memoirs etc. She’ll understand!
I cherish the idea of creating a grandiose drama in five acts by the end of 1922. I have a few sketches and plans already. The thought is terribly alluring. [ … ]
Of course with this all-consuming work, I will never be able to write anything sensible, but at least the dream and the work on it are precious. If the Diary comes into her hands just briefly, then I would ask her immediately and straight away to copy out word for word everything concerning the murder and the gramophone, the conspiracy between Felix and Purishkevich, Purishkevich’s reports to Nicholas, the personality of Nikolay Mikhaylovich, and to send it to me in letters (I suppose that’s all right? If she marks it ‘Material for a drama’?). Maybe it’s awkward of me to ask her to take on such a burden, but she will understand. The Rumyantsev Library doesn’t have sets of newspapers for 1917!! I’d be very grateful. [ … ]
I send you a big kiss, dear Mama.
Tasya too. We send kisses to everybody.
Mikhail.
P.S. My most agreeable memory in recent days has been – can you guess?
How I slept on the divan in your room and drank tea with French rolls. I would give a great deal to spend even two days just lying down like that, drinking my fill of tea and not thinking about anything. I’m so dreadfully tired.
I send a big kiss to Ivan Pavlovich.
To Kostya: it’s time he wrote me a letter!
1 December 1921. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
My dear Nadya,
Why don’t you write?! At one time I was subjected to an onslaught by the crew from our dear house committee. ‘But Andrey Mikhaylovich [Zemsky] isn’t here 365 days in the year. He should be taken off the register. And we don’t know where you’ve sprung from either … ’ etc. etc.
Without in any way declaring war I exercised diplomatic tolerance, putting up with their insolent and familiar tones as much as was appropriate. [ … ] They’ve evidently left off for the moment. I insisted that Andrey should not be taken off the register. So for the moment all is as it was. [ … ]
I am in charge of news items for the Trade and Industry Herald, and if I go crazy, that will be the reason. Can you imagine what is involved in publishing a private newspaper?! [ … ] I am going completely mad. And the printing-paper!! And what if we don’t get enough advertising? And the news items!! And the censorship!!! I spend the whole day on hot coals. [ … ]
Don’t be surprised by the wild untidiness of this letter. It’s not on purpose, but because I am literally tired to death. I’ve given it all up as a bad job. I can’t even think about any writing. I am happy only when Taska treats me to some hot tea. She and I are eating immeasurably better than at the beginning. I wanted to write you a long letter with a description of Moscow, but this is what came out …
I send you a kiss.
Mikhail.
Kiss Andrey for me.
Please give Kostya the enclosed letter.
15 December 1921. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
This deathly silence from Kiev is beginning to worry me. Why don’t you write?
I am overwhelmed with work at the Herald. Taska and I are now eating perfectly reasonably. If the Herald keeps flourishing, then I hope that we shall survive. I earn three million a month. It’s just miserable that it doesn’t come with guaranteed rations.
I’ll write briefly (it’s half-past two in the morning). Would you write and report to me the prices in the Kiev market (white flour and rye flour by the pood [a measure of about 36 lb.], bread by the pound, butter by the pound, sunflower oil, meat by the pound (different kinds?), pork, milk (by the jug or some other measure), lump sugar and granulated by the pound and so on). And check the source. Indicate what date the prices relate to. So, for example: the market prices in Kiev on such-and-such a date: meat (lb.) etc. [ … ]
If you don’t want to take this on, maybe Andrey would? I’ll be waiting for an answer.
Why don’t you write? I send you a kiss.
Mikhail.
30 December 1921. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
Please write and tell me what is going on. I haven’t heard a whisper from you. The editorial board of the Herald has sent you an invitation to become their correspondent. Send in reports a couple of times a week on the prices in the market. [ … ] Maybe you could look for a representative who would sell the Herald in Kiev? If you succeed, let me know.
I wish you all a happy New Year.
Mikhail.
10 January 1922. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
Today I received your letter of 1 Jan. with a note dated 2 Jan. You shouldn’t even need to ask about the cost of the newspapers and of sending them! Send them immediately. It goes without saying that the moment the first batch of them arrives we will transfer an advance to you (and will continue to cover the costs!). [ … ]
I do understand that you need money, but there was nothing I could do about getting any sent until I’d had a reply from you!! I’ll put the pressure on now.
I’m in a hurry. I kiss you and Andrey.
Your Mikhail. [ … ]
P.S. Could you possibly let me know straight away what newspapers are being published in Kiev (are there any private ones?). In my next letter I’ll send you a sketch, ‘Moscow’s Doing Business’. Maybe you could get it taken somewhere? It might be interesting for Kiev now that we have the New Economic Policy.
13 January 1922. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
Today the Herald received your report of the prices in the market for 31 December, and I immediately insisted that the editor should get 50 thousand transferred to you. That’s been done. And at the same time as your report came in a terrible blow fell, the significance of which you will instantly appreciate, and which I am writing to you about in confidence. The editor has told me that under the pressure of external circumstances the Herald is going bust. The ed. says there is still some hope, but I know for certain that it won’t survive the seventh issue. Finita! [ … ]
You will appreciate how I must feel today as I disappear up the chimney together with the Herald.
Crushed, in a word.
Otherwise I would describe to you how all night long on Christmas Eve and through Christmas Day water poured through the ceiling of my room.
I send kisses to everyone.
Mikhail.
From Bulgakov’s diary
25 January 1922
I’ve been neglecting my diary, which is a pity, since a lot of interesting things have been happening. [ … ] I am still without a job. My wife and I are eating very badly, which is why I don’t feel like writing. Black bread costs 20 thousand a pound.
26 January 1922
I have joined an itinerant group of actors; we’re going to perform in the suburbs. They pay 125 a performance, which is appallingly little. And of course there will be no time to write because of these performances. It’s a vicious circle. My wife and I are half-starving.
2 February 1922. From Kiev to Moscow
From his sister Nadezhda (telegram)
Mama has passed away. Nadya.
From Bulgakov’s diary
9 February 1922
This is the blackest period of my life. My wife and I are starving. I have had to accept a little flour, vegetable oil and some potatoes from my uncle. [ … ] I have run all over Moscow, but there are no jobs. My felt boots have fallen apart.
Veresayev is very ugly, and he looks like a middle-aged Jew (he’s very well preserved). He has very narrow eyes with heavy, drooping eyelids, and he’s bald. He has a low voice. I liked him very much. [ … ] Veresayev is close to the students, who insist that the burning issues of the day should be addressed, and demand truthful solutions. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, it comes out in a clever and cultured fashion.
24 March 1922. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
My dear Nadya,
[ … ] I cannot tell you how much I was cheered by the news of Vanya’s health. [ … ]
Apart from the Scientific and Technical Committee I am working for a new big newspaper (an official one). With the two jobs I earn only 197 roubles a month (40 million according to the People’s Commissariat of Finance rate), i.e. half of what Tasya and I need to live on (if you can call my existence over the last two years living). She, of course, isn’t working, but does the cooking on a small iron stove. [ … ]
I won’t begin to describe life in Moscow. It is so much like something from a fairy-tale that it would take eight extra pages to tell you about it. Otherwise it would be impossible for you to understand. And then I don’t know whether you are interested? Anyway, I will mention two or three details, plucking them out at random.
The most characteristic things that have struck me are that 1) a man who is not properly clothed is lost; 2) the number of trams is increasing while, according to the rumours, shops and theatres (except for ‘grotesque’ shows) are closing down and private publishing houses are going bust. It is impossible to tell you about prices, since the currency is falling at a dizzying rate, and sometimes prices have changed from one morning to the same evening. For example, in the morning vegetable oil costs 600, and by the evening it’s 650. Today I bought myself a pair of yellow English boots in the market for four and a quarter million. I was in a terrible hurry to get them, since they will cost 10 within a week.*
Everything else, as I’ve said, is indescribable. The housing problem is extraordinary. It’s fortunate for me that that fifthfloor nightmare where I have struggled to live over the last half-year is cheap (about 700 thousand). [ … ]
They turned the heating off a week ago.
I am literally overwhelmed with work. I don’t have time to write or to study French properly. I am putting together a library for myself (the second-hand booksellers, ignorant and impudent bastards, are more expensive than the shops). [ … ]
Please write. I send you a kiss.
Mikhail.
* Just now, as I was about to seal the letter, I discovered that the boots are not English but American, and that the soles are made of cardboard. My God, I am so fed up with all this!
24 March 1922. From Moscow
To his sister Vera
Dear Vera,
On many occasions I have tried to sit down and write to you but, can you believe, I am so tired after all my drudgery that sometimes in the evenings I don’t have the strength to squeeze a line out of myself. Last autumn I received a letter from you and replied to it straight away. Evidently it didn’t reach you. The young man who came here (he saw only Tasya and didn’t find me in) said that you were cross with me for being silent. Now I want to pick up my correspondence with the family again, and I hope you will write to me.
First of all: did you receive the news of Mama’s death? (She died of typhus on 1 February 1922.) Varya sent you a telegram from Kiev. [ … ]
The most dreadful problem in Moscow is that of housing. I am living in the room Andrey Zemsky left behind. The room is terrible, the neighbours too. 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, Flat 50. I don’t feel secure there, and it was an awful lot of bother to get it. I won’t write about the prices in Moscow, they’re unbelievable. [ … ] I have a great many acquaintances in Moscow in the worlds of journalism and the theatre, but I don’t see people very frequently since I am consumed by my work and dash about Moscow purely and simply on journalistic business. [ … ]
I’m very anxious to know how you are living. You’re not going hungry?
Everyone has gathered at Ivan Pavlovich’s (Lyolya, Kostya, Varya and Lena), and Andrey and Nadya are at Vasily Pavlovich’s.
I miss the family.
Vanya and Kolya are well, so I am told.
I will expect a letter from you describing your life and your plans.
I send you a kiss.
Your Mikhail.
18 April 1922. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
I am sorry that I didn’t have time to send you greetings for Easter. My life is such drudgery that I literally don’t have a minute. I just had two days to catch my breath over the holiday. And now my nightmare has begun again. [ … ]
The rent is going up. One and a half million for April. The heating was turned off in March. All the book-bindings are covered in mould. [ … ]
I am making efforts to find a room. But it’s hopeless. They demand enormous sums just for telling you where to find one. [ … ]
Prices. There’s no point in telling you: they change by hundreds of thousands each day. Before the holiday white flour cost 18 million a pood. White bread was 375 thousand a pound, and butter was one million 200 thousand a pound. [ … ]
I send you a kiss.
Mikhail.
To fellow-writers
M. A. Bulgakov is working on the compilation of a complete bibliographical dictionary of modern Russian writers, with their literary profiles. The comprehensiveness of the dictionary will depend to a significant degree on the extent to which authors themselves will respond and provide lively and useful information about themselves. The author requests all Russian writers in all the towns of Russia and abroad to send auto biographical material to the following address: Moscow, 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, Flat 50.
29 December 1922. Moscow
From Ye. Krichevskaya (editor of On the Eve)
P. Sadyker has been to see me and told me that he saw you and Katayev, and that he came to an agreement with you about a permanent post which would provide you with a regular income. I could only welcome such a decision.
23 January 1923. From Moscow to Kiev
To his sister Vera
Dear Vera,
Thank you all for your telegram and greetings. I was very delighted to hear that you were in Kiev. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to tell from the telegram whether you had come back for good or just for a time. My dream is that all our family should settle down at long last in secure nests in Moscow and in Kiev.
I feel that you and Lyolya, together and amicably, should be able to make lives for yourselves in the same spot where Mama did. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that it would be better for Ivan Pavlovich too if someone were to remain with him from the family which is so closely linked and so indebted to him. I keep thinking sadly about Kolya and Vanya, and about the fact that none of us now has any means of helping them. I think of Mama’s death with great sorrow, and of the fact that it means that there is now no one left in Kiev with Ivan Pavlovich. My only wish is that your coming should not bring discord into the family but, on the contrary, should bind the Kievans even more closely together. That’s why I was so delighted when I read the words ‘loving family’. That’s the most important thing for all of us. Truly, only one spark of goodwill, and you would all settle down wonderfully together. I can judge by myself: after all the difficult trials of these last years I prize peace and quiet above all! I would so like to be amongst my family. But there’s nothing to be done about that. Here in Moscow, in conditions that are immeasurably more difficult than where you are, I am determined to get my life running normally.
And that means that my hopes for Kiev rest with you, Varya and Lyolya. I have talked about it a lot with Lyolya. All that we have gone through has had an effect on her as on everyone else, and like me she wants there to be peace and harmony in Kiev.
My great plea to you is that you should live on amicable terms with one another in memory of Mama.
I am working very hard and am dropping with exhaustion. I may succeed in making a brief visit to Kiev in the spring, and I will hope to find you there and to see Ivan Pavlovich. If you do settle down in Kiev, consult with Ivan Pavlovich and Varvara to see whether it’s not possible to do something to preserve Mama’s plot of land at Bucha. I would be dreadfully sorry if it went.
Please give Ivan Pavlovich warmest greetings from me and Tasya.
Your brother Mikhail.
21 February 1923. From Berlin to Moscow
From P. Sadyker (at On the Eve)
Much respected Mikhail Vasilyevich [sic],
Now that we have published our first books, it is becoming possible for us to publish new books rapidly. During my stay in Moscow you offered me your Cuff-notes for publication, but at the time I was unable to take any decision since I did not know how our publishing house was placed. I would now like to ask you to offer us publication rights. Unfortunately, we cannot offer Moscow royalties. The maximum that we can pay is seven to eight dollars per printer’s sheet.
To his sister Nadezhda
Dear Nadya,
Big kisses to you, Andrey and the infant. Thank you for the pie. I am very sorry that you didn’t come. I would have treated you to a rum baba. I’m really in a ghastly state, I’m ill and everyone has abandoned me. I haven’t shown myself because I am urgently finishing off the first part of a novel; it’s called The Yellow Banner [The White Guard]. And soon I will come and see you. [ … ]
Your Mikhail.
From Bulgakov’s diary
24 May 1923
It’s a long time since I have sat down to my diary. On 21 April I left Moscow for Kiev and stayed there until 10 May. I had an operation in Kiev on a swelling behind my left ear. I didn’t manage to get to the Caucasus as I had intended. I got back to Moscow on 12 May. [ … ]
Altogether we seem to be on the eve of great events. Today there were rumours in the papers that English naval ships were to be dispatched to the White Sea and the Black Sea, and there was news that Curzon refuses to hear of any compromises and has demanded that Krasin (who dashed off to London in an aeroplane straight after the ultimatum) should carry out the terms of the ultimatum to the letter.
Life in Moscow is bustling, especially in comparison with Kiev. This manifests itself principally in the fact that a sea of beer is being drunk in Moscow. And I am drinking a lot of it too. Altogether I’ve begun to let myself go recently. Count Aleksey Tolstoy has arrived from Berlin, and is leading a dissolute life and behaving rather impudently. He drinks a lot.
I’ve become quite unsettled, and I haven’t written anything for six weeks.
11 July 1923
The longest gap in my diary. And what has been happening meanwhile has been of enormous importance. That sensational conflict with England ended quietly, peacefully and shamefully. The Government made the most humiliating concessions. [ … ]
The day before yesterday on walls and fences there appeared an appeal from the Patriarch, beginning with the words ‘We, by the grace of God, Patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia … ’. Its message: that he is a friend to Soviet power, condemns the White Guard, but also condemns the Living Church. There will be no reforms in the Church except for a new orthography and style. There’s an unbelievable row going on now in the Church; the Living Church is furious, because they wanted to get rid of Patriarch Tikhon altogether. [ … ]
It’s a horrid, cold and rainy summer.
White bread costs 14 million a pound.
25 July 1923
As before, life is chaotic, rushed and nightmarish. Unfortunately I am spending a lot of money on drink. [ … ] Because of my work for The Hooter, which takes up the best part of the day, I have scarcely made any progress on my novel.
Moscow is extremely lively, and there is more and more traffic.
27 August 1923
I sat next to Katayev. [Aleksey] Tolstoy was speaking about literature, and mentioned me and Katayev as contemporary writers. My book [Cuff-notes] has still not come.
28 August 1923. From Krolevets to Moscow
From the writer Yury Slyozkin
Dear Mikhail,
I am writing to you from the blissfully run-down little town of Krolevets, where I have come from Chernigov to spend the rest of the summer. This is authentic countryside, with innumerable orchards, vegetable gardens, ravines, dusty hawthorn trees and delightful little houses painted in bright colours. I am in a state of bliss here: in the mornings I write, then I sunbathe, go for strolls, read and eat until I’m bursting. Everything is cheap and of good quality, and tasty; I was already collapsing under all the berries, and now I’m guzzling apples – all different kinds, colours and flavours. And they cost two roubles 50 kopeks for ten! I’m not even missing Moscow, although it’s high time …
I’ll probably stir myself at the beginning of the month. What’s happening at On the Eve? [ … ] Any news of our Berlin books? When are they finally going to come out? And what’s new in literature, anyway?
In Chernigov and in Krolevets I gave lectures about Moscow, in which I mentioned you and Katayev as the most talented of the young writers working for On the Eve.
And what of your novel? I have high hopes of it. Have you finished Diaboliada? I’m looking forward to hearing it when I get back. [ … ]
I kiss Tanyusha’s little hands; tell her – in fact I’ll tell her myself – what’s in my heart … there is no need of witnesses.
I send you a kiss.
Your Yury Slyozkin.
31 August 1923. From Moscow to Krolevets
To the writer Yury Slyozkin
Dear Yury,
I am hurrying to reply to you so that the letter will find you still in Krolevets. I am envious of you. In Moscow I’ve become completely worn out. [ … ]
The publication of our books is causing me considerable irritation; they still haven’t appeared. Finally Potekhin told me that he was expecting them any day now. According to rumours they are ready. (The first to come out will be yours and mine.) It’ll be interesting to see whether they do let them come out. I am extremely concerned about mine. It didn’t occur to them, of course, to send me any proofs.
I’ve finished Diaboliada, but it’s scarcely likely to get through anywhere. Lezhnev [at Rossiya] has refused to take it.
I’ve finished the novel, but it hasn’t been typed yet, it’s lying in a big heap while I have a good think about it. Here and there I am making corrections. [ … ]
I don’t think there will be time for me to send our books to you in Krolevets. Probably by the time I get hold of them you will already be in Moscow.
It’s difficult to tell you much that’s new in a short letter. In any case, things are clearly livening up, rather than declining, in the world of literature and publishing.
Come back soon! There are lots of interesting things to talk about.
Tanya sends greetings to you and Lina. And I send Lina a separate supergreeting.
They’re drinking an inordinate quantity of beer in Moscow at the moment.
I send you a kiss.
Your M. Bulgakov.
From Bulgakov’s diary
2 September 1923
Today Katayev and I visited Aleksey Tolstoy at his dacha. He was very friendly today. The only thing I don’t like is the incorrigible manner he and his wife have of talking to young writers in an offh and way. But his truly considerable talent makes up for everything else. [ … ]
In the midst of my spleen and my yearning for the past, and despite these ridiculous cramped circumstances I find myself in, in this vile room in this foul apartment-block, I sometimes experience, as at this moment, bursts of confidence and strength. And I become aware of the thought darting up in me that it is true, I am immeasurably more powerful a writer than any of those I know. But in conditions such as the ones I have presently to endure I may have to kowtow to them.
3 September 1923
After the terrible summer some wonderful weather has set in. For several days now there has been bright sunshine and it has been warm. Each day I go off to work at this Hooter of mine, and waste the day there absolutely irretrievably.
Life has worked out in such a way that I have little money but I am living, as always, beyond my modest means. You eat and drink well and plentifully, but then there’s no money to buy anything else. I can’t get through a single day without that damned pigswill – beer.
18 September 1923
I’m not feeling well today. I am short of money. The other day I received news of Kolya [his brother Nikolay] – a letter from him; he is ill with anaemia and feels depressed and miserable. I wrote to On the Eve in Berlin to get them to send him 50 francs. I hope those swine will do it. [ … ]
Until I have my own apartment I will not be a human being, but half of one.
30 September (17 September according to the old [pre-Revolutionary] calendar) 1923
Probably because I am a conservative … ‘to the core’, I was going to write, but that’s a cliché: well, in a word, a conservative … I am always drawn to my diary on the old saints’ days. What a pity that I no longer remember the precise date in September when I arrived in Moscow two years ago. Two years. Has much changed in that time? Of course, a great deal has. But all the same, this anniversary finds me in the same room, and just the same person inside.
Apart from anything else, I am unwell …
First, politics, which are just as vile and unnatural as ever. There’s still a lot of unrest in Germany. The mark, however, has begun to go up again, [ … ] but there is an internecine struggle going on in Bulgaria. They’re fighting the Communists! [ … ] As far as I am concerned there is not the slightest doubt that these minor Slav states are just as backward as Russia, and so represent a splendid breeding-ground for Communism. Our newspapers are blowing events up in every possible way, although who knows, maybe the world really is splitting into two parts – Communism and Fascism.
No one knows what will happen. [ … ]
If I discount the real and imaginary fears in my life, then I must admit that there is only one major flaw in my life at the moment – the lack of an apartment.
As a literary figure I am making my way slowly, but I am making progress, of that I am convinced. The only problem is that I can never be clear and confident that I really have written something well.
5 October 1923
In Germany, instead of the expected Communist revolution, they have ended up with overt and sweeping Fascism.
Today I went to see the doctor to get advice about the pains in my leg. He made me very miserable by saying that he’d found I was really in a bad way. I will have to take my treatment seriously. The really dreadful thing is that I am afraid to take to my bed, since I am being undermined in the delightful organ [The Hooter] for which I work, and they might show me the door without any pity. [ … ] A French roll costs 17 million, while a pound of white bread costs 65 million. Ten eggs yesterday cost 200. [ … ]
I haven’t heard a word about Cuff-notes. That’s evidently the end of that.
19 October 1923
I am waiting for a reply from Nedra about Diaboliada.
On the whole, I have enough for food and trifles, but there’s nothing for clothes. And if it weren’t for being ill, I would face the future fearlessly. So let’s trust in God and live, that’s the best way, and the only way.
26 October 1923
I am unwell, and that’s unpleasant, because I may be forced to take to my bed. [ … ] On my way back from The Hooter I dropped in at Nedra to see P. N. Zaytsev. They are going to take my story Diaboliada, but they won’t give more than 50 roubles a printer’s sheet. And there’ll be no money at all before next week. It’s an idiotic story, not fit for anything. But Veresayev (who is one of the editors at Nedra) liked it very much.
In moments of ill-health and loneliness I succumb to melancholy and envious thoughts. I bitterly regret that I abandoned medicine and condemned myself to an uncertain existence. But God is my witness that my love of literature was the only reason for doing it.
Literature is a difficult business at present. For me, with my opinions, [ … ] it is difficult to get published and just to live. Given all that, my ill-health has come at a bad time as well.
But I mustn’t be dejected. I’ve just been looking through The Last of the Mohicans, which I recently purchased for my library. What fascination there is in sentimental old Fenimore Cooper. His David, who is constantly singing snatches of the Psalms, was the one who turned my thoughts towards God.
Maybe He’s not needed by the bold and the brave, but for such as myself it is easier to live with the thought of Him. My illness is a complex and a lingering one, and I am completely run down. It could hinder me from working, which is why I fear it; and that’s why I place my hopes in God. [ … ]
We are a barbaric and unhappy people. [ … ]
My premonitions with regard to people never let me down. Never. A crowd of exceptional swine has begun to group itself around On the Eve. And I can congratulate myself on being one of their number. Oh, I shall have a very hard time of it later on, when it comes to scraping the accumulated mud off my name. But there is one thing I can say to myself with a clear conscience. Iron necessity forced me to publish my things with them. If it hadn’t been for On the Eve, then neither Cuff-notes, nor much else in which I have been able to express at least something truthful in literature, would have seen the light of day. You would have to be an exceptional hero to keep total silence for four years, to keep silent with no hope that you will ever be able to open your mouth in the future. I, unfortunately, am not a hero. [ … ]
There is no letter from Kolya. I have neglected my correspondence with Kiev irretrievably.
27 October 1923
I’ve just been looking [ … ] at a suite of boudoir furniture, which is going for a very low price – 60 roubles. Tasya and I decided to buy it, if they are prepared to defer payment until next week. This will be clarified tomorrow, although I’m taking a risk; they should pay me for Diaboliada at Nedra next week.
Late October 1923. Moscow
To his sister Nadya
Dear Nadya,
I have sold a story, Diaboliada, to the Nedra publishing house, and the doctors have found that both my knee-joints are affected; furthermore, I have bought a suite of furniture covered in silk which is quite decent. It’s already standing in my room.
What will happen now I don’t know; my illness (rheumatism) is depressing me very much. But if I don’t snuff it like a dog – I’d very much like not to die just now – then I’m going to buy a carpet. [ … ]
I send a kiss to little Chizhka.
Your deceased brother Mikhail.
From Bulgakov’s diary
29 October 1923
The heating went on for the first time today. I spent the entire evening sealing the windows. This first day of heating was marked by the fact that the notorious Annushka left the kitchen window wide open all night. I positively don’t know what to do with the swine who inhabit this [communal] apartment. Because of my illness my nerves have really gone to pieces, and these sorts of things drive me to distraction.
6 November 1923
I am reading Gorky’s masterly work My Universities. I have been thinking a great deal, and one way and another have come to recognize that I must stop playing around. What’s more, literature has become my life. I am never going to go back to any form of medicine now. I don’t much like Gorky as a person, but what a giant, what a powerful writer he is, and what awesome and important things he has to say about the writer. [ … ] I am frightened by the fact that I am thirty-two, by the years I have squandered on medicine, by my illness and weakness. I have this idiotic swelling behind my ear, which has already been operated on twice. [ … ]
I am going to study from now on. I can’t believe that the voice that keeps troubling me at the moment is anything but prophetic. It must be. There is nothing else for me to be. I can be only one thing – a writer. I must observe, and I must study, and keep my own counsel.
8 January 1924
In the newspapers today there is a bulletin about the health of L. D. Trotsky. It begins with the words ‘L. D. Trotsky became ill on 5 November last year … ’ and ends ‘ … leave, and is relieved of all his duties for a period of not less than two months.’ I need make no comment on this historic bulletin.
And so, on 8 January 1924, Trotsky was given the push. God alone knows what will happen to Russia. God help her!
22 January 1924
Just now (at 5.30 in the evening) Syomka told me that Lenin has died. According to him, there was an official announcement about it.
25 February 1924
This evening I received from Pyotr Nikanorovich [Zaytsev] a brand-new copy of the Nedra almanac. In it is my story Diaboliada. [ … ] And so, for the first time, I have been published not in the pages of newspapers or in slender journals, but in a book, an almanac. Yes … And how much torment it has cost me!
15 April 1924
In Moscow there have been numerous arrests of people with ‘distinguished family names’. And again sentences of internal exile. David Kiselgof [later Tasya’s second husband] was here today. As usual he was full of fantastic rumours. He says that a manifesto from [the Grand Duke] Nikolay Nikolayevich is supposedly going around in Moscow. The devil take all the Romanovs! They’re the last thing we need now!
25 May 1924. Moscow
To Pyotr Zaytsev (at the Nedra publishing house)
Dear Pyotr Nikanorovich,
I am leaving Cuff-notes for you, and beg you most earnestly to decide its fate as quickly as possible. [ … ]
I would be very glad if you did take Cuff-notes. Personally I am very fond of it.
It would be a very good thing if Nikolay Semyonovich [Angarsky] were to invite people to a reading soon. I would read it myself, and its fate would be decided at once.
For myself I wish nothing, except death. That’s the parlous state my affairs are in!
Your M. Bulgakov.
P.S. I will telephone you and drop in today and tomorrow.
To Pyotr Zaytsev (at the Nedra publishing house)
Dear Pyotr Nikanorovich,
As always, it never rains but it pours: I’m in bed with appendicitis. [ … ] I won’t take up the offer of a job, but as soon as I have the money I’m going to leave for the south.
Can you tell me what’s happening about my Cuff-notes?
Your M. Bulgakov.
From Bulgakov’s diary
21 July 1924
This evening, as usual, I was at Lyubov Yevgenyevna’s [she was soon to become Bulgakov’s second wife]; I went away into the rain feeling sad and somehow homeless.
Ilf and Yury Olyesha have just arrived from Samara. There are two trams in Samara. On one of them it says ‘Revolution Square – Prison’, and on the other it says ‘Square of the Soviets – Prison’. Something like that. In other words, all roads lead to Rome! [ … ]
Anyway, it is interesting chatting to Olyesha; he is sarcastic and witty.
25 July 1924
During the day I telephoned Lezhnev [at Rossiya] and discovered that there was no point at this stage in negotiating with Kagansky about publishing The White Guard as a separate volume, since he has no money at present. This is a new shock. [ … ] I am sure that I shall end up with The White Guard on my hands. In other words, the devil knows what’s going on. Late, at around twelve, I went to see Lyubov Yevgenyevna.
6 August 1924
It will be interesting to see how long the ‘Union of Socialist Republics’ can survive in these circumstances [after the collapse of Anglo-Soviet negotiations].
9 August 1924
They’ve introduced buses in Moscow. [ … ] For the moment there are just a few of them. They’re very attractive, massive but elegant at the same time; they’re painted brown, and the window frames (they have glassed-in windows) are yellow. They have just one deck, but they’re enormous.
26 August 1924
I went to Professor Martynov’s clinic about the foul swelling behind my ear. He says he doesn’t believe it is malignant, and said I should have some X-rays.
26 September 1924
I’ve just come back from the Bolshoy Theatre; Lyubov Yevgenyevna and I went to Aida. [ … ] All day long I’ve been trying to get money for a room with Lyubov Yevgenyevna.
18 October 1924
I’m having considerable difficulties with my grotesque story [The Fateful Eggs]. Angarsky [from Nedra] has [identified] about twenty passages that will have to be changed because of censorship considerations. I wonder whether it will get through the censors?
20–21 December 1924
The hopes of the White émigrés and the counter-revolutionaries inside the country that the disputes over Trotskyism and Leninism would lead to bloody conflicts or a coup inside the Party have of course, as I predicted, come to nothing. All that’s happened is that Trotsky has been swallowed up. [ … ]
Moscow is full of mud, but on the other hand there are more and more lights. Two processes have come strangely to coexist here: life is getting under way, and at the same time it is suffering from complete gangrene. In the centre of Moscow, starting at the Lubyanka, the Waterway Organization has drilled out the earth for an experimental Metropolitan underground system. That is new life. But the Metropolitan won’t be built, because there’s no money for it. That’s gangrene.
They’re working out a new traffic scheme. That is life. But there is no traffic, because there are no trams; and it’s laughable, but there are only eight buses for the whole of Moscow.
Housing, families, scholarship, work, standards of living and practical ideas – these are all suffering from gangrene. Nothing moves. Everything has been devoured by Soviet officialdom, which is a gaping maw. Every step or movement made by a Soviet citizen becomes a torment which consumes hours, days, and sometimes months. There are some shops open. That is life. But they go bust, and that’s gangrene. And it’s the same in everything else.
The state of literature is dreadful.
23 December 1924
Today is the 23rd according to the new calendar, so tomorrow is Christmas Eve. They were selling green fir-trees outside Christ Church. I left home very late today, at about two, partly because my wife [i.e. Lyubov Yevgenyevna, to whom he was not yet officially married] and I slept in very late as usual. We were woken at half-past twelve by Vasilevsky [Lyubov Yevgenyevna’s former husband], who’d arrived from Petersburg. Once again I was forced to let the two of them go off together on their affairs. [ … ] I didn’t get hold of any money anywhere today, and so came home feeling sour and sullen. I was very annoyed when I thought about their journey together [ … ] and a terrible rage came over me when I got home [ … ]. Under no circumstances must I talk about politics.
26 December 1924
I couldn’t restrain myself [at a literary evening at Angarsky’s] from getting involved several times in the conversation: I made a speech about the fact that it was difficult to work at present, and attacking censorship and so on, things I oughtn’t to have said. Lyashko, a proletarian writer, who instinctively felt an irresistible antipathy towards me, made objections with ill-concealed irritation: ‘I don’t understand what this “truth” is that comrade Bulgakov is talking about.’ [ … ] When I talked about the fact that the present age was an age of swine, he replied with hatred, ‘You’re just talking rubbish.’ [ … ]
But more than by all these Lyashkos, I am bothered by the question, am I a writer or not?
27–28 December 1924
I am writing at night because almost every night my wife and I don’t get to sleep until three or four in the morning – we’ve got into this rather idiotic habit. We get up very late, at twelve, or sometimes at two or four in the afternoon. [ … ]
Moscow is a splendid city. Today I didn’t see my only true and tender love, the Kremlin. [ … ] I happened to see on a news-stand on Kuznetsky Bridge Street the fourth number of Rossiya. In it was the first part of my White Guard, or rather not the first part, but the first third. I couldn’t resist buying another copy at a second news-stand. [ … ] The novel seems partly weak and partly very powerful to me. I can’t make sense of my own impressions any more. Above all my attention was drawn to the dedication [‘This book is dedicated to Lyubov Yevgenyevna Belozerskaya’]. Well, that’s just how things worked out: there she is, my wife. [ … ] I have noticed that she waddles slightly when she walks. Given the way my ideas are developing, it’s terribly stupid, but it appears that I am in love with her. One thought concerns me. Would she have adapted so cosily to just anybody, or was it specially for me? [ … ] Not for my diary, and not for publication: my wife overwhelms me sensually. That’s good, and desperate, and sweet, and at the same time hopelessly complicated: just at the moment, as it happens, I am poorly and for me she … Today I saw her getting changed before we went out to Nikitina’s, and watched greedily. [ … ] … the witch has got me bogged down like a cannon in a swamp … [ … ] But I can’t imagine myself on my own, without her. Obviously I’ve got used to her.
2–3 January 1925
As I was walking past the Kremlin and had reached the tower on the corner, I looked up, paused, and began to look at the Kremlin, and I had just begun to think to myself, ‘How long, oh Lord?’, when a grey figure with a briefcase popped up from behind me and looked me over. Then he attached himself to me. I let him go ahead, and we walked for about a quarter of an hour together. When he spat from the parapet, I did the same. I managed to get away near the Alexander II monument.
3 January 1925
I’m in a dreadful state: I’m falling more and more in love with my wife. It’s so infuriating: for ten years I’ve refused to have anything to do with … Women are just women. And now I am demeaning myself to the extent even of slight jealousy. Somehow she’s very dear to me and sweet. And fat.
4 January 1925
Today [my story] Bohemia came out in Krasnaya Niva [The Red Cornfield], Number 1. This was my first appearance in the boggy cesspit of specifically Soviet journals. I read it through today, and liked it very much.
5 January 1925
‘How will it all end?’ asked one of my acquaintances today. Questions like these are asked mechanically and dumbly, and hopelessly, and with indifference, and just for the sake of it. At that precise moment in his apartment, in the room across the corridor, some Communists were getting drunk. There was some sharp stench in the corridor, and one of the Communists, so my acquaintance informed me, was sleeping, drunk as a pig. He was invited to join them and couldn’t refuse. He would go into their room with a polite and ingratiating smile, because they summoned him constantly. He kept coming back to me and cursing them in a whisper. Yes, all this will end somehow, I do believe that. [ … ]
Today at The Hooter I sensed with horror for the first time that I can’t write sketches any more. I’m physically incapable of it. I am committing an outrage on myself and on my physiology.
16 January 1925
The day before yesterday I attended a reading given by Andrey Bely. [ … ] He was recounting his recollections of Valery Bryusov. All this produced an intolerable impression on me; it’s all symbolist rubbish. [ … ] I left without waiting for the end. After the Bryusov there was supposed to be an extract from Bely’s new novel. Merci.
14 February 1925. Moscow
From Boris Leontyev (at the Nedra publishing house)
Please bring the manuscript of The Heart of a Dog with you to read.
20 February 1925. Moscow
From Boris Leontyev (at the Nedra publishing house)
Dear M. A.,
Hurry up, please do everything you can to let us have your story The Heart of a Dog. Nikolay Semyonovich [Angarsky] may be going abroad in about two or three weeks’ time, and we won’t have time to get the thing through the Censorship Committee. And it will scarcely be possible to pull it off without him. If you don’t wish the book to be shelved until the autumn, hurry, hurry.
3 April 1925. Moscow
From Boris Vershilov (at the Moscow Arts Theatre)
Most esteemed Mikhail Afanasyevich!
I would very much like to make your acquaintance and talk over a number of matters with you which are of interest to me and which may perhaps whet your curiosity.
If you are free, I would be glad to receive you tomorrow evening (4 April) in the Studio’s premises …
With greetings.
B. I. Vershilov.