The boost to Bulgakov’s spirits provided by the prospect of at last regaining his love had invigorating effects on his work for the rest of 1932. Apart from his work on the prose biography of Molière during that summer, Bulgakov was also nurturing the idea of another work connected with Molière. In July, he had been commissioned by the Zavadsky Theatre Studio to do a translation of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Around the time of his marriage to Yelena Sergeyevna, during September, October and the first half of November, Bulgakov tackled this project with vivacity, and what emerged was not so much a translation as a ‘Molieriana’, as he called it: a pot-pourri of Molierian themes and characters largely based on Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, but also incorporating some of Bulgakov’s own reflections on the way in which theatre succeeds in making its audiences suspend their disbelief. The result was an exuberant piece, but it was rejected by the Theatre, presumably because it strayed too far from the original commission.
Undaunted, Bulgakov pressed on with his prose biography of Molière during the winter of 1932–33, and delivered it to the publishers on 5 March 1933. But a month later this work too was rejected, and on similar grounds: the editor Aleksandr Tikhonov found the tone and structure far too playful, and Gorky, to whom the manuscript was sent in Italy for a second opinion, on this occasion agreed with Tikhonov rather than supporting Bulgakov. The problem may well have been that the general editors of the series, which had only recently been launched, had in mind a collection of thoroughly conventional biographies – such as have indeed characterized the series to this day. Bulgakov, however, had produced a witty and ingenious text. His account opens with a narrator observing the birth of the infant Molière, attended by a midwife who is wholly indifferent to the notion of the child’s future renown; and Bulgakov goes on to indulge in a great many digressions on the nature of glory in art as opposed to glory in politics, and on the ups and downs of a playwright’s career, which were uncomfortably suggestive of issues of the day in the Soviet Union. ‘According to Tikhonov, “fairly transparent hints about our Soviet reality emerge” in my work!’ commented Bulgakov sardonically in a letter to Pavel Popov (page 158) in which he describes the fiasco. One might add that it was just as well Tikhonov never saw the – still unpublished – notebook in which Bulgakov wrote the first draft of this biography, where the contemporary references are made even more explicit.
For Bulgakov the rejection of this work was yet another painful blow, seemingly demonstrating that in the 1930s too he was going to be balked in reaching an audience with the works he cared about most passionately. His play about Molière had got bogged down at the Moscow Arts Theatre and was being rehearsed only intermittently and lackadaisically; the adaptation of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme had not found favour; and now the prose biography which had absorbed him so happily was deemed unacceptable. The ‘Molière years’ between 1929 and 1933 had given him considerable personal satisfaction, but they brought him no material rewards.
One consequence of this complete frustration of all Bulgakov’s endeavours since 1929 was that work on the novel that would become The Master and Margarita became more intensive, starting from his honeymoon weeks in Leningrad with Yelena Sergeyevna in October 1932. Having, as he declared in his 1930 letter to Stalin, burned the earlier drafts of the novel he had begun in 1928, he now returned to it with renewed excitement, and worked on it in every spare moment that could be snatched from his more mundane commitments. A text that had apparently started as a satirical novel about the Moscow cultural scene, and which had involved a Christ and a Devil figure, now acquired new features. As Marietta Chudakova has shown, the first full draft, completed between 1932 and 1936, gained an autobiographical dimension with its new hero, the unnamed Master. The author of a book containing the story of Christ and Pilate, as a hero he is flawed by traits of weakness and cowardice. His talent is saved through the love borne him by the courageous Margarita, who, by entering into a pact with the Devil figure – the ultimately benevolent Woland – and being transformed into a witch, wreaks violent revenge on the critics who have ruined the Master. Clearly the character of Margarita is modelled on Yelena Sergeyevna, whose fierce devotion to Bulgakov has been testified to by all who knew her. Real experiences, or sometimes just wishful fantasies, from Bulgakov’s life with Yelena Sergeyevna were later frequently taken up and woven into the complex tapestry of the novel.
An important new source of information distinguishes the documents presented in this and the last chapter from those in the earlier part of this book: the diaries that Bulgakov asked Yelena Sergeyevna to keep from 1 September 1933 onwards, which provide a detailed chronicle of his daily activities, his social circle, his meetings with people and his increasing despair. These diaries have not yet been published as an integral text, either in their original form or in the version Yelena Sergeyevna prepared for publication during the 1950s, and although they have been quoted in a few Soviet publications, no Westerner gained access to them until 1990. Interleaved with Bulgakov’s correspondence of the period, the diary entries paint an extremely vivid picture of what it was like to live among the élite of Moscow’s cultural world, in the orbit of the Moscow Arts Theatre and the Bolshoy. Yet at the same time this was the era of Stalin’s Terror, which became particularly sweeping after the murder of Kirov in December 1934, a murder we now know to have been engineered by Stalin himself – who then used it as an excuse to root out supposed threats to his rule. Yelena Sergeyevna’s diaries portray what it was like to be continually spied upon and surrounded by informers in a period when arrests, imprisonments, sentences of internal exile and executions were nightmare everyday occurrences.
After the failure of his Molière projects, Bulgakov’s creative work between 1932 and 1936 continued with a succession of lesser works. In the early summer of 1933, for example, a Leningrad music-hall theatre commissioned from him a comedy which became the rather unsatisfactory Bliss, a science-fiction play with a somewhat wooden anti-Utopian plot. The play was written between December 1933 and April 1934, by which time the Satire Theatre in Moscow had also signed a contract for it. But neither the Satire Theatre nor the Leningrad theatre was satisfied with the result – the Leningrad director’s embarrassed visit to Bulgakov’s hotel is described very wittily in a letter to Pavel Popov (page 177) – and in September 1934 Bulgakov was asked to rewrite the text entirely, leaving out the futuristic scenes, but preserving the idea of bringing Ivan the Terrible forward in a time machine to the modern age. By October 1935 the text, now retitled Ivan Vasilyevich, was finally submitted to the Repertory Committee, who after much suspicion and hesitation eventually concluded that there was no really subversive content in this amusing but slight comedy, and licensed it for performance. At the end of 1935, rehearsals of Ivan Vasilyevich at last got under way at the Satire Theatre. Meanwhile Bulgakov’s time in 1933 and 1934 had been taken up with very occasional and half-hearted rehearsals of his Molière; with endless rumours that the ban on Flight might be lifted; and with work as an actor for the Moscow Arts Theatre. This last was a new departure for him and was something he undertook partly out of financial necessity, but by all accounts he took great pleasure in dressing up and appearing as the judge in a stage adaptation of The Pick-wick Papers, which he had helped his friend the playwright Natalya Venkstern to write.
During the summer of 1934 another new venture involved Bulgakov’s moving into the realm of cinema. He was approached to write a film scenario of Gogol’s Dead Souls – no doubt as a result of the popularity of his stage adaptation of the novel for the Arts Theatre. But this commission, like the theatre adaptation, turned into a frustrating ordeal: all his most imaginative proposals – such as to exploit the screen’s visual potential by means of literal representations of Gogol’s hyperbolic metaphors (for example, by giving visual reality to the image of a character advancing on the hero like an army), and once again to use as a framework the image of Gogol leaning against his balcony in Rome – were rejected, and he was forced back, as he had been in the Arts Theatre, on to a more conventional interpretation. What was worse was that the studios rejected three separate drafts of the scenario, and Bulgakov not only ended up having to initiate formal complaints against them for breach of contract, but also had to fight off the film’s director, Ivan Pyryev, who kept trying to rewrite the text himself and claim rights over it. His experiences with the other film scenario commissioned from him, an adaptation of Gogol’s play The Government Inspector for film studios in Kiev, were less painful; amicable relations were maintained throughout, but he was so weary and tied up with other work that he was happy in the end to sign away seventy-five per cent of his rights in the scenario and allow the film’s director, M. S. Korostin, to do most of the writing.
In August 1934 Bulgakov began to sketch out plans for a more substantial work. He wanted to write another biographical play about a writer, but this time the subject was to be Russia’s national poet, Pushkin. The centenary of Pushkin’s death was to fall in 1937 and would certainly be celebrated by a number of theatres: this project, at least, surely could not backfire? Bulgakov resolved to invite his old friend Vikenty Veresayev to be his co-author: this would not only be a mark of his gratitude for Veresayev’s financial and moral support in the past, but would also guarantee the project’s academic reputation. Veresayev was one of the country’s leading experts on Pushkin’s life, the author of innumerable biographical studies of the poet and the compiler of a highly regarded collection of memoirs about him; and after a moment’s hesitation he readily agreed. His initial doubts were aroused by Bulgakov’s absolute determination that Pushkin himself should not appear on stage during the course of the play; this was partly because Bulgakov feared that such an appearance could lead to a vulgarization of the figure of the poet, but he may also have felt, after all his experiences with his Molière projects, that it would be safer not to risk attracting the wrath of the critics by presenting an ‘incorrect’ image of Pushkin. The play that he wrote with Veresayev’s help, Last Days or Pushkin, is a skilful depiction of the forces bearing down on Pushkin during the last days of his life: the hostility of the Court, the fact that both the Tsar and the officer D’Anthès were pursuing his wife Natalya, persecution by the secret police, jealousy in literary circles and financial difficulties – all of which culminated in Pushkin’s fighting and perishing in a duel in 1837, a death that has ever since been perceived in Russia as an assassination. But despite all these careful preparations, the writing of this play too ended up being bedevilled with problems, notably when Veresayev decided that his role was being undervalued and he started a ferociously outspoken correspondence on the subject with Bulgakov, accusing him of seeking to play down the social aspects of Pushkin’s tragedy. During the summer of 1935, just when Bulgakov thought the play was ready to be delivered to the Vakhtangov Theatre – and to the Arts Theatre, who were hoping to put on a rival production – the letters between him and Veresayev grew more and more bitter. By the end of 1935, however, Veresayev had decided to withdraw his name from the play, while retaining his right to half of the royalties, and the play began to be prepared for production by the Vakhtangov.
The spring of 1935 also brought the apparent culmination of Bulgakov’s torments over his play Molière. The play had now been in rehearsal for some four years, partly under the direction of Nikolay Gorchakov, and more recently under the direction of Stanislavsky himself. Bulgakov had been appointed an assistant director on the production, and his experience of working closely with Stanislavsky drove him into a frenzy; in his letters he describes graphically how Stanislavsky tried to pressure him into rewriting the text of Molière so that the French playwright should clearly be seen on stage ‘being a genius’. Stanislavsky also wasted immense amounts of time, as Bulgakov saw it, applying his famous ‘method’, which took the actors right away from the text into various exercises and improvisations. A few years later Bulgakov would compose a wicked satire on these episodes in his hilarious but unforgiving Theatrical Novel (published in English as Black Snow). In 1935, however, he simply lost patience with Stanislavsky altogether, and after one particularly irksome rehearsal wrote him an ultimatum demanding that the play be put on in its original form or not at all. Stanislavsky withdrew in a huff, and the co-Director of the Theatre, now his archrival, Nemirovich-Danchenko, took over instead.
By the beginning of 1936, the prospect of a public performance of Molière, a work of huge personal significance for Bulgakov, at last began to seem real. A series of unofficial premières took place during February and early March; each performance was more successful than the last, and each ended with at least twenty curtain-calls. Artistically, the play was a triumph. But the first few months of 1936 were a particularly savage time for the Soviet arts: a series of vitriolic articles in Pravda attacked a whole range of leading cultural figures, such as Shostakovich, and the reviews of Molière were unanimously hostile. On the morning of 9 March 1936 an article pouring scorn on Bulgakov’s Molière appeared in Pravda. By the time he arrived at the Theatre that day, the management had already cancelled all further performances of the play, in a prompt action that Bulgakov would never forgive them. And although plans for the staging of Pushkin at the Vakhtangov and Ivan Vasilyevich at the Satire Theatre were pursued for a little longer, these productions too were soon axed without ever reaching the stage. This was Bulgakov’s most comprehensive defeat, and it was a blow from which he would never fully recover.
The years between 1932 and 1936, as portrayed particularly in Yelena Sergeyevna’s diaries, were years full of animation as well as gloomier or more ominous moments. It is characteristic of Bulgakov’s letters that he very rarely talks about other people or about matters not directly concerned with his own affairs. As well as being a symptom of his own self-absorption and a result of his tendency to use his letters sometimes as a substitute for a diary – and sometimes, as with his letters to his brother abroad, as a kind of public statement partly aimed at those who might well be intercepting them – this silence about others should be understood as stemming from a general habit of discretion developed by a great many Soviet citizens. Yelena Sergeyevna’s diaries, by contrast, while clearly suppressing or coding some facts, are much franker than her husband’s letters, and they give a marvellous sense of their day-to-day lives. They are helpful, for example, in giving an idea of just which people were regarded by her, and to some extent therefore by him, as true friends. Yakov Leontyev, who worked first at the Moscow Arts Theatre and later in the management of the Bolshoy, figures throughout as a man much loved in their household. Bulgakov’s old friends Pavel Popov and Nikolay Lyamin do not elicit especially favourable comments from Yelena Sergeyevna (although Bulgakov clearly chose to see a lot of them); and she reserves some particularly sharp remarks for both Lyamin’s and Popov’s wives. Notable absentees from among the most regular visitors to the household are Bulgakov’s sisters, particularly Nadya and Yelena (Lyolya), who were both living in Moscow; family history has it that Yelena Sergeyevna did not particularly encourage their erstwhile intimacy with Mikhail, an attitude his sisters rather resented.
Regular visitors in the mid-1930s included Dmitriyev, a stage-designer; the doctor Arendt (related by marriage to Leontyev); and writers such as Ilf and Petrov. The poet Akhmatova was an occasional guest when she was visiting the Mandelstams in the apartment-block on Nashchokinsky Street, which Bulgakov and Yelena Sergeyevna finally moved into – to Bulgakov’s great relief – in February 1934. Akhmatova was not an intimate friend, but she admired Bulgakov’s work and trusted his acumen and integrity when it came to dealing with the Party leadership; more than once she came to him for advice about how to help her friends or family when they fell foul of the secret police. Indeed, Bulgakov established quite a reputation as someone who knew how to compose letters to Stalin, and several people turned to him for assistance, as Zamyatin had done in 1930 when he was drafting the letter that eventually led to his being permitted to leave the USSR.
The Bulgakovs had a particularly complicated relationship with Yelena Sergeyevna’s sister Olya (Olga Sergeyevna Bokshanskaya) and her husband Yevgeny Kaluzhsky. Bokshanskaya worked in the Moscow Arts Theatre as a secretary, at first to the management in general, and then to Nemirovich-Danchenko in particular, while Kaluzhsky was an Arts Theatre actor. Olga’s blind devotion to Nemirovich-Danchenko and insensitivity to Bulgakov’s talent and feelings used to enrage Yelena Sergeyevna; Olga was very sympathetic, for example, to the Communist playwright Afinogenov, a figure whom Bulgakov frequently came across at the Arts Theatre, and whose career always seemed to be taking priority with the Theatre management, causing Bulgakov to feel slighted. Nevertheless, Olga and Yelena Sergeyevna managed to remain in regular and usually civil contact with each other.
Amongst the other regular visitors to the household were a whole series of snoopers and informers – during this period, Kantorovich, Emmanuil Zhukhovitsky and Grisha Konsky – who had perforce to be tolerated, despite the way they insisted on steering the conversation into questions of political conviction. It is almost impossible to imagine the continual tension this situation must have created, and perhaps the only consolation was the pleasure Bulgakov would take from time to time in deliberately shocking them. The attentions of these informers became particularly assiduous following the new American Ambas sador William Bullitt’s attendance of a performance of The Days of the Turbins at the Arts Theatre, which led to a whole series of invitations to social occasions: guests from the American Embassy came to visit the Bulgakovs in their apartment, and they were in turn invited back to a series of glamorous functions. The most remarkable of these was the grand ball thrown by the Ambassador in April 1935; its exoticism clearly provided direct inspiration for Bulgakov’s depiction of Satan’s ball in The Master and Margarita. On this occasion they also made the acquaintance of one of the best-known informers who used to attach himself to foreigners in Moscow, Baron Shteyger, who would figure in The Master and Margarita as Baron Maygel. The luxurious lifestyle of the Americans, with their casual talk of travelling all over the globe, gave the Bulgakovs a tantalizing glimpse of a totally different way of life, which Yelena Sergeyevna especially revelled in.
Another relatively glamorous world that Bulgakov and his wife were beginning to move into by the end of 1935 was that of the country’s top musicians. They became friends with Melik-Pashayev, Principal Conductor at the Bolshoy Theatre, and also got to know the composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich. At the time of the Pravda articles that virtually destroyed both Shostakovich’s and Bulgakov’s careers early in 1936, Bulgakov’s Pushkin play was being considered by both Prokofiev and Shostakovich as the potential basis for an opera. For Bulgakov, to whom music was of supreme importance, evenings at home spent making music on their recently acquired piano with the leading composers of the age were a valuable source of relief amid the gathering gloom.
All in all, this had been an enormously difficult period for him; the cruel, teasing way in which his dream of travelling abroad was snatched away from him – when he had already seen his and Yelena Sergeyevna’s passports lying on a desk in the early summer of 1934 – nearly broke his health altogether. When he wrote yet another letter to Stalin, recounting this outrage, it too remained unanswered; whatever sympathetic interest Stalin may once have felt, which had prompted him to help Bulgakov in 1930, had now apparently vanished. Combined with the increasing number of arrests, which since the late 1920s had picked off a large number of his friends and acquaintances – Mandelstam was arrested in May 1934 in the building they both lived in – Bulgakov’s sense of being trapped in the USSR, at the mercy of the taunts of his gaolers, brought him to a state of nervous breakdown. He became terrified of going out on his own, and although, after months of suffering, treatment with hypnosis eventually brought the problem under control, it was a condition that later returned at particularly difficult moments. He also began to suffer from an agonizing preoccupation with thoughts of death.
This, then, was his state of mind when the calamity of 9 March 1936 and the suppression of Molière hit him. It is perhaps not all that surprising that, even before Molière was taken off, Bulgakov had told one of the new Directors of the Arts Theatre, Arkadyev, that the only subject for a play that now really interested him was the theme of Stalin himself.
5 October 1932 – 10 April 1933. From Moscow to Paris
To Lyudmila and Yevgeny Zamyatin (the writer)
Dear Lyudmila Nikolayevna and Zhenya!
I’ve been writing you this letter since October last year. I began it in your wonderful Astoria Hotel in Leningrad. [ … ]
Well, I have got divorced from Lyubov Yevgenyevna and am married to Yelena Sergeyevna Shilovskaya. I hope that you will love her and look on her kindly, as I do. We are living on Pirogovskaya Street as a threesome – the two of us and her six-year-old son Sergey. We spent the winter by the stove telling fascinating tales of the North Pole and of elephant-hunting; we shot at one another with a toy pistol and were continually ill with flu. During that time I wrote a biography of your fellow Parisian Jean-Baptiste Molière for the series ‘Lives of the Great’. At the moment Tikhonov is sitting admiring it.
And so you have succumbed to Anna Karenina? My God! The very word ‘Tolstoy’ horrifies me! I have written an adaptation of War and Peace. I now cannot walk past the shelf where Tolstoy stands without shuddering. And you ask when I am planning to visit the West? Just fancy, over the last three months many people have been asking me that question.
14 January 1933. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
Dear Kolya!
I hope that you are alive and well. You’ve already got used to the fact that news from me comes rarely, and I also have heard nothing of you recently. I trust Ivan and his family are alive and well too.
At the moment I’m finishing a big piece of work – a biography of Molière.
You would oblige me very much if you could find a spare moment to go and have at least a quick look at the Molière monument (the Molière fountain) on rue Richelieu.
I need a brief but exact description of the monument as it looks at present, approximately along the following lines:
The material and colour of Molière’s statue.
The material and colour of the figures of the women at the base.
Does water still run in the fountain (the lions’ heads at the bottom)?
8 March 1933. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
My dear Kolya!
Our household has been a sick-bay for the whole of the last month. The family’s been overwhelmed by flu. Which was why I didn’t let you know straight away that I had received your letter which I needed so much, with the description of the fountain.
You touched me infinitely by replying in such detail to all my questions. The photograph is very precious. I send you my thanks and a kiss!
To my great happiness I have at last completed my work on Molière, and I delivered my manuscript on the 5th. It wore me out exceedingly and sapped all my vigour. I can no longer recall for how many years, if you go back and count the beginning of the work on the play [Molière], I have been living in the unreal, fairy-tale Paris of the seventeenth century. Now it looks as though I am parting from it for ever.
If fate should carry you to the corner of rue Richelieu and rue Molière, remember me! And give my greetings to Jean-Baptiste de Molière!
13 April 1933, Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
Well sir, my Molière period has begun. It started with Tikhonov’s review. Dear Patya, this review contains a number of pleasant things. My narrator, who is in charge of the biography, is described as a casual young man, who believes in sorcery and the demonic, possesses occult powers, is fond of risqué stories, uses dubious sources and, what’s worse, is inclined to royalism. But that’s not all. According to T., ‘fairly transparent hints about our Soviet reality emerge’ in my work! [ … ]
Having thought the matter over carefully, I decided it would be better not to join battle over it. I just growled about the form of the review, but I didn’t bite. And in fact this is what I have done: T. writes that instead of my narrator, I ought to put in ‘a serious Soviet historian’. I informed him that I am not a historian, and refused to redo the book. [ … ]
And so, it is my pleasure to bury Jean-Baptiste Molière. It will be better and more peaceful for everyone. I am entirely indifferent to the idea of my book jacket adorning the window of some shop. In actual fact I am an actor, not a writer. And apart from that I love peace and quiet.
So there’s your report on the biography you were interested in.
Please telephone me. We will arrange an evening when we can get together and weave into our conversation at table the names of those glorious comedians Sieurs Lagrange, Brécourt, Du Croisy and the knight commander himself, Jean Molière.
19 May 1933. Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
A rumour is circulating that you are going off on holiday. [ … ] I hope you will snatch a moment to drop by to say goodbye. Bring the ill-fated Molière with you.
And me? The wind is rustling the foliage by the skin clinic, and my heart misses a beat at the thought of rivers, bridges, seas. There is a gypsy moan in my soul. But it will pass. I can already tell that I shall sit through the whole summer on Pirogovskaya Street writing a comedy (for Leningrad). There will be heat, and banging, and dust and mineral water.
2 August 1933. From Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
First of all, I should like to tell you about our trip to Leningrad. The Moscow Arts Theatre were performing The Days of the Turbins there in two theatres. They had a great success and full houses, and in consequence I kept getting information that I had become rich. And indeed, the royalties from them should be quite respectable.
And so we went off to Leningrad, knowing how difficult it is to get one’s hands on such riches.
At this point not I, but Yelena Sergeyevna, armed with an authorization [she had taken over the running of Bulgakov’s business affairs], swept into the second theatre – the Narva House of Culture. The theatre manager twice swore that he would transfer five thousand from my royalties the moment we’d left. As you can guess, he hasn’t yet transferred so much as five kopeks. [ … ]
I just dream about the happy day when she will get her way and I, having paid off my remaining debt to you, will be able to say once again what you have done for me, dear Vikenty Vikentyevich.
Oh, I won’t ever forget the years 1929–31!
I would get back on my feet sooner, by the way, if it weren’t for the necessity of leaving this monstrous pit on Pirogovskaya Street! Because the apartment on Nashchokinsky still isn’t ready. They’re a year late. A year! They’ve really mangled me over this.
A demon has taken hold of me. In Leningrad and now here, as I suffocate in these little rooms, I have begun to scribble down all over again page after page of that novel I destroyed three years ago. Why? I don’t know. I’m just amusing myself. Let it fall into the river Lethe! Anyway, I will probably put it down again soon.
13 August 1933. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
Could you please help me in one particular matter by taking on power of attorney for me? Mme Maria Reinhardt, an actress [ … ], has translated my play Zoyka’s Apartment into French and is offering to get it put on in French in the theatre. [ … ] I have agreed to this.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
1 September 1933
Today is the first anniversary of the day when M. A. and I came together again after our separation.
Misha insists that I keep this diary. He himself, after that time in 1926 when they took his diaries away after a search, swore that he would never keep a diary again. For him it is dreadful, incomprehensible, to think that a writer’s diary might be confiscated.
14 September 1933. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
The information in the newspapers to the effect that the Moscow Arts Theatre is putting on Molière and Flight is more or less correct. But the whole business of Molière has become so long drawn out (for reasons purely connected with the Theatre) that I have begun to lose hope about the production, and as for Flight, then if Fate is kind it will be put on by the spring of 1934. Neither play has any hope, as far as I can see, of being put on in any other theatres in the USSR. There are ominous signs of this.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
22 September 1933
Misha is at the Popovs’, and I am heaving books through into the dining-room – the study is damp and they’re being ruined.
24 September 1933
This evening we had Olya and Kaluzhsky [Yelena Sergeyevna’s sister and brother-in-law] and Lyubasha [Lyubov Yevgenyevna], who today moved into a separate room of her own, next door to us.
27 September 1933
Misha read to Kolya L[yamin] some new chapters from the novel about the Devil, written over the last few days, or rather nights.
28 September 1933
Each evening M. A. tells Sergey stories from a series called ‘Bubkin and His Dog Freckle’. Bubkin is an imaginary ideal little boy, a daredevil, prince and knight, and these are his adventures. While Sergey is getting ready for bed each evening Misha asks him, ‘Which number story would you like?’ ‘Um, number seventeen.’ ‘All right. You mean the one about how Bubkin went to the Bolshoy Theatre with Marshal Voroshilov? Good.’ And he begins an improvisation. Kantorovich says that there is a marvellous little boy who could play the part of Bubkin, so he should write it all down! But M. A. is busy with the novel, and in any case he doesn’t believe it would be a realistic venture.
10 October 1933
This evening we had Akhmatova, Veresayev, Olya and Kaluzhsky and Patya Popov with Anna Ilyinichna. A reading from the novel. Akhmatova was silent for the whole evening.
12 October 1933
In the morning a call from Olya: Nikolay Erdman and Mass have been arrested. Apparently because of some satirical fables. Misha began to frown. [ … ]
We played tiddly-winks, which is the latest craze.
During the night M. A. burned a portion of his novel.
17 October 1933. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev (draft)
Dear Vikenty Vikentyevich,
I recall that once before I treated you to a letter that utterly perplexed you. But that’s how it always is: when my literary burden begins to weigh too heavily upon me, I share part of it with Yelena Sergeyevna. But you can weigh down a woman’s shoulders only to a certain extent. And then I turn to you.
I have not been as anxious as I am now for a long time. Sleepless nights. At dawn I begin to gaze at the ceiling and stare until life becomes established outside the window – cap, scarf, cap, scarf. God, how dreary!
So what’s the problem? The apartment. That’s the source of it. And so, in my declining years I’ve found myself occupying someone else’s living space. This one’s been handed over and the other one’s not ready. A sour physiognomy slides into the apartment from time to time and says, ‘It’s mine.’ Advises us to go to a hotel, and other such platitudes. He’s unbearably annoying. And soon this nonsense is going to acquire grandiose proportions, and it’ll be impossible to think about any work.
I’m sketching out for myself a scene of evictions, court cases, moving house and other such delights.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
18 October 1933
I went with M. A. and Seryozhka to the new building on Nashchokinsky Street. It’s possible we may be able to move in in January.
While we were there someone told us that Erdman is being sent into internal exile in Yeniseysk [in Siberia] for three years.
20 October 1933
M. A. went to see Dr Blyumental and the X-ray department about his kidneys, which have been painful recently. But they said there was nothing wrong.
1 November 1933
A phone call from Ekke [who worked for the publishers of the ‘Lives of the Great’ series].
‘Kamenev likes the Molière biography very much, and he doesn’t agree with Tikhonov’s opinion of it at all. He’s waiting for him to come back from his holiday to talk it over with him. I very much hope that the biography will be published by us after all.’
3 November 1933. From Paris to Moscow
From the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin
Dear Molière Afanasyevich,
I delayed my reply to your kind letter in order to be able to congratulate you simultaneously on the anniversary of October [1917] and on your new household. Ah, youth, youth! Frivolous people!
I was once like you, but now I am being punished for my sins: I’ve spent two months lying in bed with severe sciatica in my left leg. And it was such a shame: it happened almost on the eve of our departure for a trip to Italy, for which we already had the visas in our pockets. Instead of which it was into bed …
[Postscript from his wife Lyudmila] Let Yelena Sergeyevna keep her promise and take you around Europe.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
8 November 1933
M. A. slept through almost the entire day – he’s had a lot of sleepless nights. Then he worked on the novel (Margarita’s flight). He’s been complaining of a headache.
10 November 1933
A letter from Zamyatin in Paris, after a long gap.
13 November 1933
According to Lyubasha, Afinogenov has sent the Moscow Arts Theatre a request not to put on his Falsehood. Olya has confirmed the story. Apparently Afinogenov has admitted that the play is incorrectly constructed in political terms.
14 November 1933
M. A. has spoken to Kaluzhsky about his wish to sign up as an actor. He’s asked to be given the role of the judge in Pickwick Papers and of the Hetman in The Turbins. Kaluzhsky responded positively. I am in despair. Bulgakov as an actor.
17 November 1933
It’s well below zero. With difficulty we persuaded a man to drive us home for a lot of money and some cigarettes.
6 December 1933
Olya was here. ‘Well, what about Molière?’ ‘Nothing is clear … it’s very unlikely to go on … ’
7 December 1933
This evening Dr Damir called. He found M. A. was suffering from extreme exhaustion.
8 December 1933
Knorre [from TRAM] dropped in at the Arts Theatre, called M. A. to one side, and with great subtlety and courtesy offered him a ‘splendid subject – about the re-education of thugs in OGPU labour camps’; wouldn’t M. A. like to work on it with him? M. A. declined, with no less courtesy.
31 December 1933
Any minute now the Kaluzhskys, Leontyevs and Arendts are coming round.
They came. It was glorious. Zhenya Kaluzhsky and Leontyev were splitting their sides over the indecent comic verses M. A. wrote for the New Year – that is, the verses were perfectly decent, but the rhymes invited other words. The Kaluzhskys stayed the night.
3 January 1934
Zhukhovitsky: ‘You ought to go out with some brigade to observe a factory, or to the White Sea Canal.’ [ … ] M. A.: ‘Not only will I not go to the White Sea Canal, I’m so tired that I won’t even go to Malakhovka [outside Moscow].’
8 January 1934
‘Soon you’ll be going abroad,’ Zhukhovitsky began to say animatedly, ‘only not with Yelena Sergeyevna!’
‘By this cross’ (at this point Misha began to cross himself devoutly, although making a Catholic sign of the cross for some reason) ‘I won’t travel without Yelena Sergeyevna! Even if they thrust a passport into my hands.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I’ve got used to visiting those foreign parts with Yelena Sergeyevna. And what’s more I will not, as a matter of principle, be placed in the position of a man who is obliged to leave behind a hostage for himself.’
‘You’re not a modern man, Mikhail Afanasyevich.’
9 January 1934
M. A. is sketching out scene after scene of a play. For which theatre?
‘With my name they won’t take it anywhere. Even if it turns out well.’
15 January 1934
Misha came home immensely tired from rehearsing Molière and Pickwick.
6 March 1934. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I am hoping to show you my new abode before long, as soon as I have settled in a bit more comfortably. An astonishing apartment-block, I swear! There are writers living above and below and behind and in front and alongside. I pray to God that the building will prove indestructible. I am happy to have got out of that damp hole on Pirogovskaya Street. And what bliss, Vikenty Vikentyevich, not to have to travel on the trams!
It’s true that it’s fairly chilly, there’s something not quite right with the toilet and water leaks on to the floor from the cistern, and there’ll probably be some other problems as well, but all the same I am happy. So long as the building keeps standing!
Lord, if only spring would hurry up. What a long and exhausting winter it has been. I dream about opening the door onto the balcony.
I am weary, so weary.
6 March 1934. To Moscow
From his friend Pavel Popov
And your apartment is so splendid. It’s all the harder for me to admit it, since I was a great fan of Pirogovskaya Street, but all the same I will have to admit it. I hope that by the time we come back to Moscow you will have got some more furniture and the façade of the building is straightened out. Then everything will be all right. [ … ]
The problem of how to combine a bedroom and a study is a very interesting one. To solve it it’s not sufficient to push the desk you brought from Pirogovskaya Street under the window. It’s much more complicated and fraught than that. And a great deal depends on getting it right, above all your writing.
14 March 1934. From Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
This winter has been truly endless. You look out of the window and you want to spit. The grey snow just lies and lies on the roofs. I’m sick of the winter!
The apartment is gradually getting fixed up. But I’m as fed up with the joiners as with the winter. They come and go and bang about.
I’ve hung a lamp up in the bedroom. As for the study, to hell with it! There’s no point in all these studies.
I’ve already forgotten Pirogovskaya Street. A sure sign that life there wasn’t right. Although there was a lot that was interesting. [ … ]
Molière: well, what is there to say, we’re rehearsing. But rarely, and slowly. And, between you and me, I regard it all with some gloom. Lyusya [Yelena Sergeyevna] can’t talk about what the Theatre’s done to that play without getting angry. But that period of agitation has long since passed as far as I am concerned. And were it not for the fact that I have to get a new play staged in order to stay alive, I should long ago have ceased thinking about it. If it goes on – well and good, if it doesn’t – too bad. But I work on those rare rehearsals with great energy and excitement. There’s nothing to be done if you have the theatre in your blood!
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
27 March 1934
[Yegorov] said that Stalin was in the [Arts] Theatre a few days ago, and that he had talked among other things about Bulgakov and whether he was working for the Theatre.
‘I can vouch to you, Yelena Sergeyevna, that amongst the members of the Government The Days of the Turbins is considered to be an outstanding play.’
And altogether Yegorov was behaving in such a way that one really could believe (despite his horridness) that something very nice had been said about Bulgakov.
I told him about the new comedy, and that the Satire Theatre was taking it.
‘So what’s this, a slap in the face for the Arts Theatre?’
13 April 1934
Yesterday M. A. finished the comedy Bliss, for which he had signed a contract with the Satire Theatre. [ … ]
The other day the film director Pyryev came with a proposal for a film scenario of Dead Souls. M. A. agreed, and will do it over the summer. [ … ]
We’ve decided to put in an application for passports for foreign travel for August and September.
26 April 1934. From Moscow to Zvenigorod (outside Moscow)
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
This is typewritten because I am not entirely well, so I am lying down and dictating. [ … ] The telephone has been installed, but I won’t resort to it; I prefer the post, since the conversation I want to have is longer than a telephone one. I haven’t been able to get out anywhere because I have been completely overwhelmed with work. [ … ]
This is what I wanted to ask you, Vikenty Vikentyevich. Is there any possibility of renting a dacha out where you are living, at Zvenigorod? If it’s not difficult, could you telephone or write to me about it: from whom, and where, and is there any bathing? We’re really thinking about Seryozhka, although of course Yelena Sergeyevna is wanting to get me there too. It’s not important to me, since I don’t like the charms of the Moscow region and consequently won’t get any better there. But to keep them company and to give my wife and Sergey a chance to get some fresh air, I’m prepared to find myself at a dacha. If Zvenigorod’s no good, then we’ll find something else closer to Moscow.
But next comes the brilliant part. I decided to put in a request for a two-month trip abroad, for August and September. I lay and thought about it for several days, racking my brains, and I asked various people for advice. ‘Don’t refer to ill-health.’ All right, I won’t. I can and must refer to one thing only: I must see the world, if only briefly, I have the right to do that. I check with myself, I ask my wife, ‘Do I have that right?’ And she answers, ‘You do.’ So what then, should I refer to that?
The whole question is made insanely more complex by the fact that I absolutely must travel with Yelena Sergeyevna. I don’t feel well. My neurasthenia and my fear of being alone would turn the trip into a miserable torment. So there’s an interesting question: what can I refer to here? Some of my advisers, when they heard the words ‘with my wife’, simply waved their hands dismissively. But actually there is no reason here for waving hands. It’s the truth, and that truth needs to be defended. I don’t need any doctors or holiday resorts or sanatoriums, nor anything else of that kind. I know what I need. For two months a different town, a different sun, a different sea, a different hotel, and I believe that in the autumn I would be in a condition to rehearse in Arts Theatre Passage, and maybe even to write.
One person said, ‘Ask Nemirovich.’ No, I won’t ask him! Neither Nemirovich, nor Stanislavsky! They won’t lift a finger. Anton Chekhov [who had died in 1904] can ask them if he likes! And so I have to decide. I’ll ask Yelena Sergeyevna. She brings me good luck. It’s time, it’s high time I travelled, Vikenty Vikentyevich! Or otherwise, it will feel so strange – to have reached the sunset of my life!
Don’t wish me luck: according to our theatrical superstition, that brings bad luck. [ … ]
Despite a few defects and some damned slipshod work, I am happy in my apartment. There’s a lot of sunshine. We’re waiting for the gas, since we can’t take any baths without it; and it’s a disaster for me if I can’t take baths – they help a great deal.
28 April 1934. From Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
I have put in a request for a trip abroad in August and September. I have been dreaming for a long time about the waves of the Mediterranean, and the museums in Paris, and a quiet hotel, and no acquaintances, and Molière’s fountain, and the cafés, and, to put it briefly, simply the possibility of seeing all this. I’ve been talking to Lyusya for ages now about what a travel book I could write! [ … ]
Though I did once see a writer who had been abroad. He was wearing a beret with a little tail on it. He hadn’t brought anything back except that beret! He gave me the impression that he had spent two months sleeping, then he had bought that beret and come home. Not a line or a phrase written, not a thought! Oh, unforgettable Goncharov, where are you now? [ … ]
I beg you not to tell anyone about this for the moment, no one at all. There’s no great secrecy, but I simply want to protect myself from the fantastic chattering of all my gossiping acquaintances in Moscow! [ … ] I simply don’t want them to be prattling about such an important matter, which for me is a question about my entire future, however brief that may be, as I approach the evening of my life! [ … ]
Ah, Pavel, what letters I will write you! And when I get back in the autumn I will hug you, but I won’t buy myself a little tail. Any more than I will buy any knee-breeches. Nor any check socks …
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
1 May 1934
On 25 April M. A. gave a reading of Bliss at the Satire Theatre, which went sluggishly, and they are asking for alterations to be made. [ … ]
We have handed in our request for a two-month trip abroad to Yakov L[eontyev] to be forwarded to Yenukidze.
Olya: ‘And why on earth should they give Maka a passport? They issue them to those writers who they can be confident will write a book that is needed in the Soviet Union. But has Maka made any attempt to show that he has changed his views since his telephone call from Stalin?’
1 May 1934. Moscow
To the writer Aleksey [Maksim] Gorky
Much esteemed Aleksey Maksimovich!
The enclosed copy of my application to A. S. Yenukidze will make it clear to you that I am requesting permission to travel abroad for two months.
As I well remember your very valuable favourable comments on my plays Flight and Molière, I am presuming to trouble you once again with a request to you to give me your support in a matter that for me has a vital and purely literary significance.
In actual fact I really need a slightly longer period for my trip, but I am not asking for that, since it is crucial that I be back at the Moscow Arts Theatre in the autumn in order not to interrupt my work as a director on those plays to which I have been assigned (and in particular on Molière).
My nerves are overstrained to such an extent that I am fearful to travel alone, for which reason I request permission for my wife to accompany me.
I am absolutely convinced that this trip would render me capable of working again, and would afford me the possibility, as well as my work in the theatre, of writing a book of travel sketches, the thought of which attracts me.
I have never been abroad.
You would oblige me greatly with a reply.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
11 May 1934
Pyryev: ‘M. A., you ought to go and visit a factory and have a look … ’
(They’re all obsessed with this factory!)
18 May 1934
On the desk lay two red passports. I wanted to pay for them, but Borispolets said there was no charge: ‘They’re being issued on special instructions,’ he said respectfully, ‘please fill out the form downstairs.’ [ … ] Borispolets said that the passports wouldn’t be handed over to us today: ‘Please come back tomorrow.’ [ … ] M. A. kept repeating exultantly, ‘So that means that I’m not a captive! It means I will see the world!’ [ … ] M. A. held my arm tightly to his side and was laughing and thinking up the first chapter of the book he would bring back from his travels: ‘Am I really not a prisoner?’
This is his constant night-time theme: ‘I’m a prisoner, I’ve been artificially blinded.’
At home he dictated to me the first chapter of the book he’s planning.
19 May 1934
The reply has been put off until tomorrow.
23 May 1934
The reply has been put off until the 25th.
25 May 1934
Once again there were no passports. We decided to stop going. M. A. is feeling dreadful.
1 June 1934
Pilnyak and his wife have received their passports and left.
We’re not able to get on with anything because of this uncertainty.
Akhmatova came to see us. She has come to petition on behalf of Osip Mandelstam, who is in internal exile. [ … ]
There is considerable agitation amongst the writers in Moscow; they’re processing applications for a new Writers’ Union. Many are not being accepted. [ … ] On 29 May M. A. sent in an application form.
M. A. feels terrible, he’s suffering from a fear of death and of solitude. Whenever he can he keeps to his bed.
10 June 1934. Moscow
To Yosif Stalin (draft)
Much esteemed Yosif Vissarionovich!
Allow me to inform you of what has occurred:
1.
At the end of April this year I sent to the Chairman of the Government Commission that runs the Arts Theatre an application, in which I requested permission for a two-month trip abroad together with my wife Yelena Sergeyevna Bulgakova.
In the application I described as the purpose of my trip the fact that I wished to write a book about my travels around Western Europe, with the idea that on my return I would submit it for publication in the USSR.
And since it is the case that I suffer from exhaustion of the nervous system, which is connected with a terror of being on my own, I also requested that my wife be granted permission to accompany me, on the understanding that she would leave behind here for those two months my seven-year-old stepson, whose maintenance and upbringing I am responsible for.
Having sent off the application I began to wait for one of two replies, that is to say, either permission to travel or a refusal of my request, since I imagined that there could be no third reply.
However, what occurred was that which I had not foreseen, that is to say a third alternative.
On 17 May I received a telephone call, during which the following exchange took place:
‘Have you put in an application regarding a trip abroad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please go to the Foreign Section of the Moscow Regional Executive Committee, and fill out a form for yourself and for your wife.’
‘When should I do that?’
‘As soon as possible, since the question of your application is going to be considered on the 21st or the 22nd.’
Overcome with joy as I was, I didn’t even enquire as to who was talking, and immediately went and presented myself with my wife at the For. Sec. of the Executive Committee. The official, when he heard that I had been summoned to the F. S. by telephone, asked me to wait, went into the next room, and when he came back asked me to fill in the forms.
When we had done that he accepted them, attaching two photographs to them, and wouldn’t take any money, saying, ‘These passports will be free.’
He wouldn’t take our Soviet passports, saying, ‘That comes later, when you exchange them for the passports for foreign travel.’
And then he added the following, word for word: ‘You will receive your passports very soon, since there is an instruction about you. You could have had them today, but it’s already late. Give me a ring on the morning of the 18th.’
I said, ‘But the 18th isn’t a working day.’
To which he replied, ‘Well, on the 19th then.’
On the morning of 19 May when we rang, they said, ‘The passports aren’t here yet. Ring towards the end of the day. If they’re here, the passport official will issue them to you.’
When we rang towards the end of the day it emerged that the passports weren’t there, and we were asked to ring again on the 23rd.
On the 23rd I went with my wife in person to the F. S., and there learned that the passports weren’t there. At that point the official began to make enquiries about them over the telephone, and then asked us to telephone on the 25th or the 27th.
At that point I became wary and asked the official whether it was correct that there was an instruction about me and whether I hadn’t misheard on 17 May?
To which I received the reply, ‘You will understand that I can’t tell you whose instruction it was, but there is an instruction regarding you and your wife, just as there is one for the writer Pilnyak.’
At which all my doubts left me, and my joy knew no bounds.
Soon after that I had still further confirmation that permission to travel had been granted. I was informed by the Theatre that someone in the Secretariat of the Central Executive Committee had said, ‘The Bulgakovs’ case is working out well.’
During this time I received congratulations on the fact that the dream I had had as a writer for so many years, my dream of travelling, something that is vital to every writer, was becoming a reality.
Meanwhile, at the F. S. of the Executive Committee, the reply about our passports was continuing to be deferred from one day to the next, but I reacted with equanimity, assuming that however much they delayed, the passports would eventually appear.
On 7 June the messenger from the Arts Theatre went to the F. S. with a list of actors who were due to receive passports for foreign travel. The Theatre was kind enough to include me and my wife on that list, even though I had submitted my application separately from the Theatre.
During the day the messenger returned, and even from his bewildered and embarrassed face I could see that something had happened.
The messenger informed me that the passports for the actors had been issued, but as far as my wife and I were concerned, he said that we had been REFUSED passports.
On the following day, with no more delay, I received a certificate at the F. S. to the effect that citizen Bulgakov M. A. had been refused permission to leave the country.
After which, rather than wait to hear everyone’s expressions of sympathy, surprise and so on, I set off home, able to understand only that I had been landed in a distressing and grotesque situation inappropriate to my years.
2.
The affront that has been offered to me by the F. S. of the Moscow Regional Executive Committee is all the more grievous for the fact that my four years of service in the Moscow Arts Theatre give no justification for it, which is why I am asking for your protection.
11 June 1934. Moscow
To Yosif Stalin (draft)
I can imagine only one single reason: is it possible that there exists in the organs that control travel abroad a theory that I might remain there for ever? I need scarcely say that in order to settle abroad after making a deceitful application, I would need to part my wife from her child and place her in a horrifying situation, to break up the life of my family, ruin with my own hands my repertory in the Arts Theatre, bring ignominy upon myself – and, above all, for no obvious reason.
But what matters here is something different: I cannot comprehend how, having conceived of one thing, one could request something else. And I have proof of the fact that that is something I cannot understand. It was I who, four years ago, addressed to the Government an application in which I requested either to be given permission to leave the Soviet Union for an indefinite period, or to be allowed to work at the Moscow Arts Theatre. When at that time I was thinking about an open-ended trip, under the pressure of my personal circumstances as a writer, I didn’t start writing about a two-month trip … I have no guarantees, nor guarantors …
20 June 1934. Leningrad
From V. Sakhnovsky (Deputy Director of the Moscow Arts Theatre)
Dear Mikhail Afanasyevich,
Today is the FIVE HUNDREDTH performance of your play. You know how much the Theatre and all our audiences in Moscow and Leningrad love The Days of the Turbins. The Turbins has become a new Seagull for the new generation at the Arts Theatre. You yourself were a witness not long ago, at the première in Leningrad, to the way in which the audience responds to your play, and the Theatre, and particularly the younger Arts Theatre generation, feels more attached to this play than to any other.
You have known for a long time from Konstantin Sergeyevich [Stanislavsky] and Vladimir Ivanovich [Nemirovich-Danchenko] that they both consider you ‘one of us’ in the Arts Theatre, ‘one of us’ in your artistic affinities, and for that reason on this day of the FIVE HUNDREDTH performance allow me on behalf of the Theatre to congratulate you as ‘one of us’, and not only as our beloved dramatist; and in my own name, without inverted commas, allow me to give you a big hug, remembering our three years of amicable work on your other play [Dead Souls].
24 June 1934. From Paris to Moscow
From his brother Nikolay
I’ve made the acquaintance of Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin and seen him a couple of times.
26 June 1934. From Leningrad to Moscow
To Yakov Leontyev (at the Bolshoy Theatre)
Up until now we have not been able to tackle any letters, but there was a reason for this. Both Yelena Sergeyevna and I have been extremely unwell. She began to get dreadful headaches, and I have been suffering from insomnia and all the other delights I brought away with me from Moscow. We began to have treatment with electricity, and the results, touch wood, have been miraculous. We’ve both begun to come round.
First of all I would like to send you a hug for your precious telegram and wonderful letters (me too).
And so, 500 performances. I had many, many thoughts on that day …
In the interval before the scene in the High School Sakhnovsky made a short speech with the curtain down. People applauded quietly so that the audience should not hear. [ … ]
Nemirovich sent a letter of congratulations to the Theatre, in which there was not a whisper about the author. Original, most original, I swear by the 500th performance! [ … ]
The ridiculous ‘me too’ that has crept on to the first page indicates a tender and unexpected postscript from Yelena Sergeyevna.
26 June 1934. From Leningrad to Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
After all that’s happened not just I, but my missus, to my great horror, fell ill. She had diabolical migraines, then the pain spread, and she was suffering from insomnia, and so on. We were both obliged to get systematic and serious treatment. We are having electric shock treatment every day, and now we’re beginning to get back on our feet.
Well now, we’ve just had the 500th performance here; it was on the 20th. [ … ] Nemirovich sent his congratulations to the Theatre too. I turned them over and over in my hands until I had satisfied myself that he had not said one word about the author. I imagine that good taste requires that the author should not be mentioned. I didn’t know that before, but evidently I am an insufficiently refined person.
The irritating thing is that, without asking me, the Theatre sent him thanks, and from the author as well. I would have given a lot to tear the word ‘author’ out of there. [ … ]
I am writing a Dead Souls for the cinema and will bring the finished thing back with me. After that, all the commotion with Bliss will begin. Oh, I have such a lot of work to do! But meanwhile my Margarita is roaming through my mind, and the cat, and flying …
10 July 1934. From Leningrad to Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
We should reappear in Moscow on about 15 or 17 July. [ … ]
Lyusya insists that the film scenario [Dead Souls] came out really well. I showed it to them still in draft form, and it was a good thing that I hadn’t bothered about a fair copy. Everything that I liked best about it, that is, the scene with Suvorov’s soldiers in the middle of the Nozdryov scene, the separate long ballad about Captain Kopeykin, the funeral service on Sobakevich’s estate and, most importantly, Rome with the silhouette [of Gogol] on the balcony – all of that was thrown out! I will succeed only in preserving Kopeykin, and then only by cutting him. But, my God, how I regret Rome!
I let Vaysfeld [from the film studio] and his director have their say, and immediately said that I would redo it the way they wanted, so that they were even rather taken aback.
Something happened here with regard to Bliss that simply goes beyond the bounds of reason.
A room at the Astoria. I read it. The Director of the Theatre, who is also the producer, expresses his complete and evidently genuine admiration, intends to put it on, promises money, and says that he’ll come back in forty minutes to have supper with me. He arrives forty minutes later, has supper, doesn’t say a word about the play, and then disappears into the ground and that’s an end of him!
Some people think he’s vanished into the fourth dimension.
So that’s the kind of miracle that takes place in the world nowadays!
11 July 1934. From Leningrad
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I would like to tell you about my unusual adventures this spring.
By the beginning of the spring I had become seriously ill: I began to suffer from insomnia, weakness and finally, which was the filthiest thing I have ever experienced in my life, a fear of solitude, or to be more precise, a fear of being left on my own. It’s so repellent that I would prefer to have a leg cut off!
And so of course doctors, sodium bromide and all the rest of it. I was afraid of the streets, couldn’t write, found people either exhausting or frightening, couldn’t bear to see the newspapers, and had to walk with either Yelena Sergeyevna or Seryozhka holding my arm – it would have been ghastly on my own!
Well, then at the end of April I wrote an application asking to spend two months in France and Rome with Yelena Sergeyevna (I wrote to you about that). Seryozhka would be here, so that would be fine. I sent it off. And then I sent another letter to G[orky]. Although I had little hope of receiving a reply to that one. Something’s happened there, as a result of which all our contacts have been broken off. Although it’s not hard to guess: someone came and said something, as a result of which a barrier has been erected. And sure enough, I received no reply! [ … ]
On 17 May I was lying on the sofa. The telephone rang and an unknown person, an official I presume, said, ‘Did you put in an application? Go to the Foreign Section of the Executive Committee and fill in a form for yourself and your wife.’ [ … ]
A state of sheer bliss reigned in our household. Can you imagine: Paris! – the monument to Molière … greetings, Monsieur Molière, I have written a book and a play about you; Rome! – greetings, Nikolay Vasilyevich [Gogol], don’t be angry, I transformed your Dead Souls into a play. True, it doesn’t much resemble the one that’s being performed in the Theatre, and in fact it’s not like it at all, but all the same I did my best … The Mediterranean sea! Oh my fathers!
Can you believe it, I sat down and began to sketch out the chapters of a book!
How many of our writers have travelled to Europe, and have come away with less than nothing! Nothing! [ … ]
Then people began to congratulate us, with just a hint of envy: ‘Oh, you lucky things!’
‘Just a moment,’ said I, ‘where are the passports, then?’
‘Keep calm!’ (in chorus)
We stayed calm. My dreams: Rome, a balcony such as Gogol describes, pine-trees, roses … a manuscript … I’m dictating to Yelena Sergeyevna … in the evening we walk, all is quiet and scented … in other words, it’s just like in a novel!
And then in September there would be a tug at my heart: Kamergersky Street, it’s probably drizzling there, the stage is half-lit, who knows, they’re probably working on Molière in the workshops …
And that’s when I’d arrive, in that drizzle. With a manuscript in my suitcase, and you can’t cap that! [ … ]
They gave a list of names to the messenger and told him to nip off and collect the passports.
So he nipped off, and then he nipped back. His face so horrified me that I was clutching at my heart before he’d even had time to open his mouth.
In other words he brought passports for everybody, and for me a little piece of white paper – M. A. Bulgakov is refused permission. [ … ] I crawled out of the wreckage in such a state that I was not a pleasant sight. But here I have begun to recover.
Before I left I wrote a letter to the General Secretary, in which I recounted all that had happened, and informed him that I wouldn’t stay abroad but would come back on time, and asked him to review the matter. There was no reply. But then I cannot even guarantee that my letter reached its destination.
On 13 June I abandoned everything and left for Leningrad. In a couple of days’ time we’ll be returning to Moscow.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
20 July 1934
On the 17th we returned from Leningrad, where we had spent more than a month living in the Astoria.
24 July 1934. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I feel so painfully for you! What an endless strain on your nerves! And so much energy gets wasted unnecessarily on it all, which would have been so useful for literary work! Aach! … I give you a strong hug and wish you spiritual strength. And what’s Italy to you! As if you couldn’t arrange peace and quiet and a rest for yourself here. But not in Leningrad, though!
31 July 1934. From Moscow to Paris
To Maria Reinhardt
I have received from my brother the French text of Zoyka’s Apartment and am rushing to send you some corrections which are vitally important, mistakes I noticed after just a hasty read through the translation. [ … ]
Neither the word ‘Lenin’ nor the word ‘Ilyich’ appears in my text. [ … ]
I don’t have the word ‘Stalin’ anywhere, and I request you to strike it out. And in general, if the names of members of the Government of the USSR have been inserted anywhere, I request you to remove them, since their inclusion is utterly inappropriate and is a complete violation of the author’s text.
1 August 1934. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
I would ask you emphatically to use all your authority to ensure the correction of some extremely unpleasant distortions of my text, namely that the translator has included in the first act (and possibly elsewhere as well) the names of Lenin and Stalin. Please ensure that they are struck out immediately. I hope that I do not need to explain at any length how inappropriate it is to include the names of members of the Government of the USSR in a comedy. [ … ]
This summer, and in fact precisely at the moment when this letter will reach you, I should have been in Paris. I was so close to it that I had sketched out the entire plan for a two-month trip. Then I would have sorted out all these matters. But at the very last moment, completely unexpectedly, and when I had every hope that the trip would be allowed – I was refused permission.
If I had been in Paris, I should have been able to show them the staging myself, I should have been able to provide a complete interpretation, not just as the author, but also as a director, and you can be sure that the play would have benefited by it. But alas, mine is a complex destiny! [ … ]
Send me Zamyatin’s address if you can.
Lyusya sends you her greetings. She often questions me, asking what my brothers are like, and I talk to her about you and Ivan, and wish that your lives should be happy.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
15 August 1934
We spent the beginning of August with Sergey, living in a dacha in Zvenigorod. Since the 9th we’ve been in Moscow, and now we’re wondering whether to go down to Kiev.
They’ve sent us a copy of the translation of Zoyka’s Apartment from Paris. M. A.’s hair stood on end. The translation itself is generally not bad, but in Ametistov’s monologues the translators have inserted without any authority the names of Lenin and Stalin, in an unsuitable context. M. A. immediately sent a letter demanding that the names be removed.
Incidentally, we still don’t know whether M. A. has been accepted by the Writers’ Union or not. They’ve been sending occasional notices, and indirectly we heard at first that they wouldn’t take him, along with some others, but then that they had accepted him. [ … ]
M. A. had an agonizing time completing Dead Souls; he’s now delivered a third version to them.
23 August 1934
For M. A. the word ‘apartment’ has magic powers. There’s nothing in the world he’s envious of, except a good apartment! It’s one of his foibles.
25 August 1934
M. A. is still frightened to go out on his own. [ … ]
A conversation with Afinogenov: ‘Mikhail Afanasyevich, why have you not been attending the Congress [of the new Writers’ Union]?’ ‘I am frightened by crowds.’ [ … ]
M. A. has got a plan for a play about Pushkin. Only he thinks it absolutely necessary to ask Veresayev to prepare the material for it. M. A feels grateful to him because at a difficult time he came to M. A. and offered him some money as a loan.
So M. A. would like to express his gratitude in this way, although I sense that nothing good will come of it. There’s nothing worse than two people working together.
29 August 1934
Zagorsky: why had M. A. not been able to accept Bolshevism …
31 August 1934
Zhukhovitsky – who is always present, of course – was pestering M. A. to make a declarative statement that he had accepted Bolshevism.
6 September 1934
M. A. had stomach-ache, he had eaten something that disagreed with him at the dacha. At first he went over Sergey’s lessons with him, and then he was teaching him to play chess. [ … ]
In the evening one of our neighbours, the writer L., came round to ask me to type out and send off a letter to the leadership; he’s not being published, he’s been excluded from everywhere, and his life is difficult. Then came a note from A., who also lives here, asking for money – we found a little at least.
7 September 1934
I accompanied M. A. to the Theatre to a rehearsal of Pickwick. [ … ]
After lunch and a sleep he dictated The Government Inspector to me.
8 September 1934
On the way to the Theatre we met Sudakov: ‘You know, M. A., the situation as regards Flight is not bad at all. They’re saying we should put it on. Both Yosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] and Avel Sofronovich [Yenukidze] very much approve. So long as Bubnov doesn’t interfere.’ (?!)
10 September 1934
On the evening of the 9th we had the Moscow cast of The Turbins, the American cast of The Turbins, Zhukhovitsky – of course – and the Kaluzhskys to visit. We had a candle-lit supper with pies, caviare, sturgeon, veal, sweets, wine, vodka and flowers. We sat very cosily until about four in the morning. [ … ]
M. A. said the evening was like the building of the Tower of Babel – people were talking simultaneously in Russian, English, French and German. Khmelyov was trying to prove to the American Aleksey in atrocious French that art did not exist in the West, that it could be found only here. As evidence he pointed to the example of Stanislavsky … [ … ]
All day we’ve been drifting about like sleepy flies.
11 September 1934
We went to the Popovs’. Annushka sang gypsy waltzes and played the guitar; M. A. is looking for some gypsy music for Flight. But will it ever be put on?
15 September 1934
Pyryev has sent a copy of the film scenario of Dead Souls back, having made his own alterations to it, but they are very illiterately done; and yet on the cover it says ‘M. Bulgakov’.
16 September 1934
In the evening – Lyamin; Misha read him several chapters of the novel. And after he left we had a conversation until seven in the morning, all on the same subject – M. A.’s situation.
17 September 1934
In the evening – Gorchakov. The Satire Theatre is asking M. A. to make a comedy out of Bliss, in which Ivan the Terrible should appear in modern Moscow. [ … ]
Ilya [Sudakov] is a real bandit; all his talk about Flight was a pack of empty lies. It now turns out that he’s got Afinogenov’s most recent play, The Portrait, in his hands.
13 October 1934
M. A.’s having a bad time with his nerves. He’s afraid of open spaces and of being on his own. He’s wondering whether to try hypnosis. [ … ]
15 October 1934
M. A.’s nerves are very jumpy, but when we’re walking together he saves himself by telling some funny story. [ … ]
This evening M. A. finished dictating to me the film scenario of The Government Inspector in draft. [ … ]
At last they’ve put in gas in our apartment! Sergey was the first to take a bath.
16 October 1934
During the rehearsal [of Pickwick] he learned that today for the first time after a long gap they were rehearsing Molière – the scene in the cathedral.
He says that he heard the news with indifference. He doesn’t believe that the play will ever be put on.
A few days ago Stanislavsky called a meeting about Molière, and M. A. came away with the gloomiest of impressions.
18 October 1934
Today we went to see V. V. Veresayev. M. A. had a proposal that he and Veresayev should write a play about Pushkin together, that is that Veresayev should select the material and M. A. would write it.
Mariya Germogenovna immediately greeted the idea with enthusiasm. The old man was very touched, trotted several times up and down his comfortable study, and then gave M. A. a hug.
V. V. really lit up and began to talk about Pushkin, about his ambiguousness, and about the fact that Natalya Nikolayevna [Pushkin’s wife] was by no means a shallow creature, but an unfortunate woman.
At first V. V. was staggered that M. A. had decided to write the play with no Pushkin in it (it would be vulgar otherwise), but agreed once he had thought about it.
20 October 1934
Today we bought a piano.
3 November 1934
There’s chaos in the apartment – we’ve got the decorators in.
Today I went to the dress rehearsal of Pickwick. [ … ] The audience laughed at M. A.’s lines (he is playing the judge). Kachalov, Ktorov, Popova and others told me that his acting was that of a professional.
His costume consists of a red gown and a long white curly wig. During the interval afterwards he told me that he had been dreadfully nervous, and that his stool had fallen over – he had knocked it over with his gown as he sat down. He had to begin the scene hanging on to the lectern by his elbows. But then they came to his assistance and picked the stool up.
8 November 1934
In the evening we sat surrounded by all the mess. M. A. was dictating the novel to me – the scene in the cabaret. Sergey was right there, sleeping on the ottoman.
A telephone call: Olya. A long conversation. Right at the end: ‘Oh yes, by the way. I’ve been meaning to say to you for several days. Do you know, it looks as though permission for Flight is going to come through. The other day they rang Vladimir Ivanovich [Nemirovich-Danchenko] from the Central Committee and asked his opinion of the play. Well, of course, he praised it to the skies, and said that it was an excellent piece. They replied, “We will bear your opinion in mind.”’
14 November 1934
A rehearsal of Pickwick in front of Stanislavsky. [ … ]
K. S. has aged a great deal and become thin.
16 November 1934
Today Stanitsyn told M. A. how the old man [Stanislavsky] had reacted to his appearance in the court scene. Stanitsyn was naming all the actors to him. When the judge appeared, Stanislavsky asked, ‘And who’s that?’ ‘Bulgakov.’ ‘Ah.’ (Suddenly, turning sharply towards Stanitsyn), ‘Which Bulgakov?’ ‘Mikhail Afanasyevich. The playwright.’ ‘The writer?!’ ‘Yes, the writer. He was very keen to have a go.’ The old man immediately narrowed his eyes, tittered, and began to watch M. A. Stanitsyn gave a hilarious demonstration of all this to us.
17 November 1934
This evening Akhmatova arrived. Pilnyak had brought her from Leningrad in his car. She told us about Mandelstam’s bitter fate. We talked about Pasternak.
19 November 1934
After the hypnosis M. A.’s attacks of terror have begun to disappear, his mood is serene and calm, and he is finding it easy to work. Now – if he could just manage to walk in the streets on his own.
21 November 1934
Today was M. A.’s nameday. Sergey and I gave him – ‘half-and-half ’, as Sergey puts it – some musical scores: Tannhäuser, Ruslan and Lyudmila, and some others. This was on the evening before.
And today I gave him an Alexander I desk.
In the evening Dr Berg came and tried to instil in him the idea that tomorrow he would go to visit the Leontyevs on his own.
Before that there was a call from Olya, with congratulations and the information that Flight hadn’t been permitted after all. M. A. took this completely calmly. We weren’t able to discover from Olya who had refused it permission.
22 November 1934
At ten in the evening M. A. got up, put on his coat, and went to the Leontyevs on his own.
He hasn’t been out on his own for six months.
26 November 1934
In the evening Ilf and Petrov came round for advice about a play they have thought up. Afterwards M. A. went to see Veresayev; V. V. accompanied him back to Smolenskaya Square, and he walked the rest of the way home on his own. He says the fear was less acute.
28 November 1934
In the evening – Dmitriyev. He came from the Arts Theatre and said there was a lot of bustle and excitement there; probably someone had come from the Government, I guess it must have been the General Secretary [Stalin] (to see The Turbins).
29 November 1934
Indeed it was the General Secretary, together with Kirov and Zhdanov, who was at The Turbins yesterday. I was told so in the Theatre. Yanshin said the company acted well, and that the General Secretary had applauded a lot at the end of the performance.
In the papers there was a very important piece of news: they’re abolishing ration cards for bread, and bread will be sold freely.
30 November 1934
During the day M. A. dictated sketches towards a version of Ivan Vasilyevich (the reworked Bliss).
It turns out that they’re planning to put Molière on in March. Although there are complications about the sets. [ … ] Gorchakov wants to commission Vilyams to design them. He says it’s going to be put on sumptuously – Stanislavsky is insisting on it.
1 December 1934
In the evening there was the premiere of Pickwick. I accompanied M. A. there in a taxi. He stayed until the end of the performance. He came back and told me that during the performance it became known that Kirov had been assassinated in Leningrad.
Many people immediately left the Theatre, amongst them Rykov.
3 December 1934
At half-past three I accompanied M. A. to the Theatre. They’re holding a memorial meeting there [for Kirov]. [ … ]
I don’t know whether Kirov had been to the theatre in Leningrad, but it’s possible that the last play he saw in his life was The Days of the Turbins.
During the day we visited Vikenty Vikentyevich. We took him the last thousand of Misha’s debt to him, and both felt relieved when it was done. [ … ]
Now about Molière. We told Gorchakov that, according to Olga, they’re going to put on The Portrait. [ … ] This is one of Vladimir Ivanovich [Nemirovich-Danchenko]’s tricks; he wants to put on a Communist play.
10 December 1934
Gorchakov rang. They’re not putting on The Portrait, and are pressing on with rehearsals of Molière.
14 December 1934
Here’s a juicy bit of gossip: apparently Anatoly Kamensky – who went abroad four years ago and didn’t come back and started being abusive about the USSR – is now in Moscow!
Misha couldn’t restrain himself and said, ‘Well comrades, this is quite mystical!’
Zhukhovitsky was very put out and said something stupid, his eyes were darting about and he was dreadfully embarrassed.
I understand him through and through now: more than once Misha and I have caught him out in a lie.
16 December 1934
During the day Misha and Veresayev went to the Vakhtangov Theatre to sign a contract.
17 December 1934
Misha went to a rehearsal of Molière while I had a conversation with Yegorov. [ … ] He had the cheek to express surprise that Misha was writing a play for another theatre and not for the Arts Theatre. So to the best of my ability I explained to him all the insults they had subjected Misha to over the last few years, what they had done with Flight, and what they were doing with Molière, which they have been rehearsing for several years!
22 December 1934
All in all, Misha has been agonizing over these past few days that he won’t be able to cope with the work: The Government Inspector, Ivan Vasilyevich, and now Pushkin coming up.
We’ve put up a tree. First of all Misha and I decorated it, laid all the presents out beneath it, switched off the electric light and lit candles on the tree; Misha played a march, and the boys [Seryozhka and Zhenya] flew into the room.
Seryozhka was so excited outside the door he was in tears; he couldn’t wait.
There were wild squeals, clattering and shouts! Then, according to the programme, there were performances. Misha had written a text based on Dead Souls. [ … ] Misha did my make-up using a cork, lipstick and powder. The curtain was a blanket on the door from the study into the dining-room, and the stage was the study. In order to play the part of my Seryozhka, Misha put on underpants, Seryozhka’s coat, which barely reached his waist, and a sailor’s jacket. He looked like a huge red cat.
31 December 1934
And so the year is coming to an end. And now, as I walk through our rooms, I frequently catch myself crossing myself and whispering to myself, ‘Oh, Lord! Please let things continue like this!’
2 January 1935
An unpleasant experience in the tram this evening, after the theatre. Some type in a hat with a blue star, blind drunk, clearly wanted to make a scene because of my fur coat. There were two women sniggering and egging him on out of curiosity. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed this hatred of fur coats!
4 January 1935
An incredible frost! It’s minus 32 degrees Celsius. I went to the Theatre with Misha [ … ]. I was wearing ski trousers, which attracted a great deal of attention amongst the actors. [ … ]
All day I’ve been recalling a notable conversation with Olga yesterday. [ … ] She said that out of common humanity one ought to feel sorry for Afinogenov. [ … ] I listened to her, said nothing, and just stared at her with such a look! … Is she telling me to feel sorry for Afinogenov? Me, the wife of Misha, who has been persecuted and stifled throughout his literary career! [ … ]
I don’t know who will ever read these notes of mine. But they mustn’t be surprised if I am always writing about practical matters. They won’t know of the terrible conditions in which my husband Mikhail Bulgakov had to work.
5 February 1935
According to Misha the session [of hypnosis] was extraordinarily successful.
10 February 1935
Victory! Today Misha went to the performance at the Theatre on his own.
15 February 1935
Zhukhovitsky was here in the evening. The same old, painful conversation on the same subject: Misha’s fate. Zhukhovitsky said that Misha should speak out on some contemporary theme and demonstrate his attitude to the modern world. Misha said, ‘I’ll not do it, so why don’t they just leave me in peace!’
2–6 March 1935. From Moscow to Kiev
To his childhood friend Aleksandr Gdeshinsky
Dear Sasha,
Thank you for remembering me, and for your kind invitation.
If you imagine that you reside in Kiev, you are cruelly mistaken! At all events the address office in Kiev has no knowledge of you there.
I was there last August [ … ]. I was in Kiev with only one purpose: to go round my homeland and show my wife the places that I once described. She wanted to see them.
Unfortunately we were able to spend only five days in Kiev. [ … ] And so I went to the hill in the gardens of the Merchants’ Assembly, looked at the lights on the river, and recalled my life.
When I walked in the parks during the day I was struck by a strange emotion. My homeland! My melancholy, sweet pleasure and agitation! I would very much like to spend time in that land again. [ … ]
P.S. My wife is called Yelena Sergeyevna. The three of us live together: she and I and eight-year-old Sergey, my stepson – an exceedingly interesting personality. A bandit with a tin revolver, and he’s learning the piano.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
5 March 1935
Misha had a difficult rehearsal of Molière at Stanislavsky’s house. He came back depressed and furious.
14 March 1935. From Moscow
To his friend Pavel Popov
Now Stanislavsky has taken command. They ran through Molière for him (except for the last scene, which wasn’t ready), and he, instead of giving his opinion of the production and the acting, started to give his opinion of the play.
In the presence of the actors (five years on!) he began to tell me all about the fact that Molière was a genius, and how this genius ought to be depicted in the play.
The actors licked their lips in glee and began to ask that their parts be made larger.
I was overcome with fury. For a heady moment I wanted to fling the notebook down and say to them all, ‘You write about geniuses and ungeniuses if you like, but don’t teach me how to do it, I won’t be able to do it anyway. I’d be better off acting instead of you.’
But you can’t, you can’t do it. So I stifled it all and began to defend myself.
Three days later the same. He patted my hand and said that I needed to be rubbed up the right way, and then it was the whole business all over again.
In other words I’ve got to write in something about Molière’s significance for the theatre, and somehow I’ve got to demonstrate that Molière was a genius, and so on.
This is all primitive, feeble and unnecessary. And now I’m sitting in front of my copy of the text, and I can’t lift my hand to work on it. I can’t not write it in: declaring war would mean wrecking all that work, stirring up a proper commotion, and harming the play itself; but writing green patches into the trousers of a black tail-coat! … The devil knows what I should do?!
What on earth is going on, dear citizens?
And by the way, could you tell me when Molière is finally going to go on? [ … ]
We didn’t eat pancakes. Lyusya has been ill. (She’s getting better now.)
And outside the window, alas, it is spring. Sometimes snow-flakes float slantingly down, or there’s no snow and there’s sun on the dining-table. What will the spring bring? I can hear a voice in myself, I can hear it – nothing!
15 March 1935. From Moscow
To Konstantin Derzhavin (a director at the Krasny Theatre in Leningrad)
And so there are ten scenes in the play about Pushkin. [ … ] The play covers Pushkin’s last days and death, but Pushkin never once appears on stage before the spectator.
At the moment nine scenes have been written in rough.
The authors have to deliver the play to the Vakhtangov Theatre not later than 1 December 1935, and the Theatre is obliged to stage it not later than 8 February 1937.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
20 March 1935
B. I. Yarkho did a translation of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and sent Misha the book with a dedication.
The day before yesterday, I think it was, we learned that he and Shpet have been arrested. We don’t know, of course, what for.
26 March 1935
Yesterday Misha and I went to a Wagner concert in the Great Hall of the Conservatoire. [ … ] We sat in the sixth row. I was in a black dress with a low-cut back, which attracted a great deal of attention. One lady said spitefully, ‘I detest such things! … ’ [ … ]
Grisha K[onsky] appeared today without warning at about three. I’m observing him very carefully to see what sort of a fish he is. I can’t work it out. He asks questions endlessly. He leads conversations into exactly the same areas, and in just the same manner, as Kantorovich and Zhukhovitsky do. [ … ]
Misha dictated the ninth scene to me today; the scene on the Moyka Canal. [ … ] I’m so glad that he’s gone back to Pushkin again. Recently he hasn’t been able to dictate at all because of all the agonies he’s been enduring with Stanislavsky over Molière.
29 March 1935
I went with Misha to the Theatre to collect his salary, then on to a café, then he went to Stanislavsky’s while I went into town and then home. During his absence they brought an envelope from the American Embassy with an invitation for Misha and me for 23 April. There was a note at the bottom saying ‘Tails or Dinner Jackets’. I’m going to have a black suit made for Misha, because he doesn’t have one. It will be interesting to go!
30 March 1935
Today Misha and I went [ … ] to the Torgsin [imported-goods] shop for material for the suit and some other things. We bought very good material, and the shop assistant assured us that it was English and specially made for tail-coats and smoking-jackets, although it was dreadfully expensive – 25 gold roubles a length. Then we bought Misha black shoes to go with the suit. There were no starched shirts.
30 March 1935. Moscow
To his doctor, Semyon Berg
In other words, I feel very well. You have managed it so that I am no longer tortured by my accursed fearfulness. That is now distant and remote. I will come and visit you. I remember our conversations warmly!
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
7 April 1935
Akhmatova came to lunch. She has come to petition on behalf of some woman friend of hers who has been sent away from Leningrad into internal exile. [ … ]
Rehearsals of Molière are continuing at Stanislavsky’s house in Leontyevsky Street, driving Misha to exasperation. Instead of rehearsing the scenes of the play, he occupies the actors in pedagogic exercises and tells them all sorts of irrelevant things which do nothing to make the play progress. Misha has been persuading me that no ‘method’ and no efforts are going to induce a bad actor to act well. [ … ]
Today I rang Red Virgin Soil and was put straight through to Marmush, who, hastily pulling himself together, very courteously informed me that the question of publishing the biography of Molière in their journal was due to be decided on the 10th or the 12th. Misha said, ‘You will never see or hear from that man again in your life.’
8 April 1935
I rather liked Pasternak – he is very unusual, not like anyone else I know. Breathing in a special way, he read his translations of Georgian verses. He evidently has a great affection for Misha. When the first toast had been drunk to the host, Pasternak said, ‘I would like to drink to Bulgakov.’ Our hostess suddenly burst in, ‘No, no! We’ll drink to Vikenty Vikentyevich [Veresayev] first, and then to Bulgakov,’ to which Pasternak obstinately retorted, ‘No, I want to drink to Bulgakov. Veresayev is a great man, of course, but he is a lawful phenomenon, whereas Bulgakov is unlawful.’
8 April 1935. From Paris to Moscow
From his brother Nikolay
Dear Mikhail,
With a feeling of great sorrow I note that once again there’s not been any word from you for a very long time. [ … ] Are you well, and is everything all right? [ … ] Greetings to you and your family from the Zamyatins, and from my wife and me.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
9 April 1935
Grisha [Konsky] is very intrigued by our invitation to the Embassy. He said he would come to see us off, he just couldn’t not, he must see how we looked.
Sergey has cut his left thumb so badly that Misha decided that he would be permanently scarred and that was the end of his music. Misha was livid, and bawled at him and at us for not taking enough care. Seryozhka stood there pale and panting. Misha put him to bed and bandaged his thumb. We called out Dr Blyumental. We thought it would have to be stitched, but it was all right.
11 April 1935
In the morning Zhukhovitsky rang – ‘When could we arrange a day? Bohlen (a Secretary at the American Embassy) would very much like to invite us to lunch.’ Instead of replying, Misha immediately invited Bohlen, Thayer (Bullitt [the American Ambassador]’s private secretary) and Zhukhovitsky to come here this evening.
For supper we had caviare, salmon, home-made pâté, radishes, fresh cucumbers, fried mushrooms, vodka and white wine. The Americans speak Russian, Bohlen very well indeed.
The supper began with Misha’s showing them the photographs for the passport forms, and saying that tomorrow he was putting in an application for a passport for foreign travel, as he was hoping to go abroad for three months or so.
Zhukhovitsky almost choked. The Americans said we should certainly go. We’re dreaming of America … Bohlen wants to translate Zoyka’s Apartment together with Zhukhovitsky.
13 April 1935
Misha went today during the day to see Akhmatova, who is staying at the Mandelstams’. They want to publish a book of Akhmatova’s poems, but very selectively. Mandelstam’s wife recalled seeing Misha in Baku about fourteen years ago walking along with a sack on his shoulder. That was during a period when he was living in poverty and sold an oil-stove in the bazaar. [ … ]
Today I learned from Olya that apparently, according to Nikolay Vladimirovich Sollogub, my first husband Yury Mamontovich Neyelov has died. How awful: I had almost forgotten all about him, but over the last few days I have recalled him very often.
14 April 1935. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
Dear Nikol!
I am glad to have had news from you. It’s a long time since I had any letters from you. And in particular, I didn’t receive your February letter.
We’re living happily, but I have landed myself with so much work that I’m not coping with it. I fell ill from overwork, but am now feeling better. [ … ]
Thank you very much for writing in such detail about Zoyka’s Apartment. At one point I did send Reinhardt my commentaries as she requested. But of course that is quite inadequate. My presence is vital.
In the next few days I shall be putting in a request for permission to travel abroad, and shall try to fit it in by the early autumn (in August-September, probably, or October). I would ask you to make contact right away with those theatrical circles that are involved in the production of Zoyka’s Apartment, to get them to send an invitation through the Soviet Plenipotentiary to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs for me to come to Paris in connection with the production.
I am convinced that if someone in Paris were to tackle this business seriously, then it might help me in my efforts. Is it really impossible to find adequate connections within influential French circles, people who could lend their weight to this invitation?
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
17 April 1935
Valera said that if she had met him in the street she wouldn’t have recognized Misha, he had changed so much and become healthy, happy and relaxed.
18 April 1935
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich [Shilovsky] told me that Irina Svechina had been arrested. I immediately went to see Aleksandr Andreyevich. He was in a dreadful state: he says that he is quite unable to work, that the house has become ‘like a coffin’, and so on.
We had lunch with Bohlen, one of the Secretaries at the American Embassy. His apartment was in an Embassy house, and was bright and beautiful, with an electric gramophone which was also a radio. Of course Zhukhovitsky was there. Then some other Americans from the Embassy came, agreeable people who behaved very simply. Before the meal we were served cocktails. The meal was without soup.
21 April 1935. From Paris to Moscow
From his brother Nikolay
I would be glad to hear about your life, but I am not losing hope of seeing you in person; I have somehow sustained my confidence in this ever since I moved to Paris. For that reason I was extremely glad at what you told me about your efforts to arrange an official trip.
22 April 1935. Moscow
To Konstantin Stanislavsky (joint Director of the Moscow Arts Theatre)
Much esteemed Konstantin Sergeyevich!
Today I received an excerpt from the stenographic record of the rehearsal of Molière on 17 April 1935, which was sent to me from the Theatre.
Having familiarized myself with it, I find myself obliged to refuse categorically to make any more changes in my play Molière, since the alterations sketched out in the record relating to the cabal scene, as well as the alterations to the text sketched out previously in relation to other scenes, utterly destroy, as I have become convinced, my artistic conception, and point to the composition of some entirely new play, which I am incapable of writing, since I am essentially in disagreement with it.
If Molière does not suit the Arts Theatre in the form in which it exists at present, although the Theatre accepted it precisely in this form and has been rehearsing it for several years, I would request you to take Molière off and to return it to me.
23 April 1935. From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
The ball at the American Embassy. During the day I went to the hairdresser’s, and on the Arbat I went up to the cars to arrange a taxi and a driver came up: ‘Yes, madam?’ I told him I would give him 40 roubles to take us there in the evening and then come and fetch us at three in the morning. He readily agreed.
I was dressed by the seamstress and Tamara Tomasovna. My evening dress was a rippling dark blue with pale pink flowers, it came out very well. Misha was in a very smart dark suit.
At 11.30 we set off. Once again the driver wouldn’t take any money in advance, but said he would come and fetch us. We told him three o’clock, and he asked if that wasn’t too early?
Never in my life have I seen such a ball. The Ambassador stood at the top of the stairs to greet his guests. Everyone was wearing tails, and there were only a few jackets and smoking-jackets. Litvinov was in tails, Bubnov in a khaki uniform, and there were a few of our military people.
Bohlen and another American, who turned out to be the military attaché, the former in tails and the latter in a dress uniform with golden aiguillettes, came down the stairs to meet us and received us very cordially.
There were people dancing in a hall with columns, flood-lights shining down from the gallery, and behind a net which separated off the orchestra there were live pheasants and other birds. We had supper at separate tables in an enormous dining-room with live bear-cubs in one corner, kid goats, and cockerels in cages. There were accordion-players during supper.
The supper was in a hall where the table laden with food had been covered with a transparent green fabric and lit up from inside. There were masses of tulips and roses. Of course there was an exceptional abundance of food and of champagne. On the top floor (it’s an enormous and luxurious house) they had fixed up a shashlyk [kebab] stand, and there were people performing dances from the Caucasus.
We wanted to leave at 3.30, but we weren’t allowed to leave, so Misha went out and found our driver, who materialized from nowhere, and let him go. And we left at 5.30 in one of the Embassy cars, having first of all invited some of the Americans from the Embassy to call on us. We were joined in the car by a man we hadn’t met, but who is known throughout Moscow and who is always to be found where foreigners are – I think he’s called Shteyger. He sat with the driver and we sat in the back. By the time we got back it was already broad daylight.
26 April 1935. Moscow
To Nikolay Gorchakov (director of Molière at the Arts Theatre)
I have developed neuralgia as a result of exhaustion, and would therefore earnestly request you to release me from my work as an assistant director for two weeks.
If you consider it necessary for me to put in an application to the Board of Directors about this, then I will do so.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
26 April 1935
Red Virgin Soil has returned the manuscript of the biography of Molière without even a covering letter. On the 20th. I had sent them a telegram asking for it to be returned.
29 April 1935
In the evening we had the wife of Counsellor Wiley, Bohlen, Thayer, Durbrow and one other American, a friend of Bohlen’s from Riga whom he asked if he could bring to visit. And, of course, Zhukhovitsky. Mrs Wiley brought me roses, and Bohlen brought Misha whisky and Polish Zubrovka vodka. Misha read the first act of Zoyka’s Apartment in its final version. [ … ] Misha read in Russian. We had a merry supper. Mrs Wiley invited us to go with her to Turkey; she’s leaving in a few days’ time to spend a month in Turkey with her husband.
30 April 1935
At 4.30 we arrived on foot at the Embassy, Misha in his dark suit and I in a well-worn black dress. Bohlen had invited us yesterday to come and see a film. [ … ] We were introduced to many people, including the French Ambassador and his wife and the Turkish Ambassador, a fat and very merry man! [ … ] Mrs Wiley invited us to visit her tomorrow at 10.30 in the evening. Bohlen said he would send a car for us.
3 May 1935
There were about thirty people at the Wileys’, including the Turkish Ambassador, some French writer who had just arrived in the Soviet Union and, of course, Shteyger. [ … ] We had champagne, whisky and cognac as we sat, and then there was a buffet supper: sausages with beans, spaghetti and stewed fruit. [ … ] The Frenchman [ … ] showed us extraordinary card-tricks. At first I thought that he’d come to some agreement with our hostess. But then, when he had performed the trick directly on me, I came to believe it. And began to feel frightened; it was quite impossible to explain.
Yesterday Zhukhovitsky dropped in during the day. [ … ] He had some very hostile things to say about Shteyger, and said that he would be horrified to meet him in our house. He even pulled a face as he said it.
8 May 1935. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
As long ago as 31 July and 1 August 1934 I wrote to you and Reinhardt that I was asking you urgently to correct those distortions that I had discovered in the French translation of Zoyka’s Apartment. [ … ]
Once again with all seriousness I would ask you to ensure that the names and surnames I indicated be struck out, both in the first act and in the others, if they should appear there. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that travestying of my text.
It is absolutely intolerable that the names of members of the Soviet Government should figure in a comic text and be spoken on stage.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
9 May 1935
Over supper Angarsky asked, ‘I can’t understand it, why is it that writers nowadays are writing about all sorts of historical subjects and avoiding modern ones?’
13 May 1935. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
You were asking about Molière?
Unfortunately it’s all in a muddle. The Arts Theatre, through its own fault, has dragged the rehearsals out for four years (something quite unprecedented!) and even so did not put it on this spring.
Instead of getting on with the play, the rehearsals of which have dragged on for so indecently long, Stanislavsky was seized with a whim and decided to start making corrections to the text. The capacious cup of my patience overflowed, and I refused to make any alterations. What will happen next I don’t know.
The apartment? A middling apartment, as Sergey puts it, and it’s too small for us, of course, but after Pirogovskaya Street it’s sheer bliss! It’s light and dry, and we have gas. God, how delightful! I call down a blessing on the person who thought of putting gas into apartments.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
13 May 1935
A few days ago [a theatre] asked M. A. to agree to write a play about the Civil War for the 1937 celebrations [of the anniversary of October 1917]. [ … ] I am very pleased that he has refused, since from bitter experience of the work for the cinema and then with the Molière biography, which was written on commission, I know that at first they always treat you gently, but then they pester you – nothing is right, everything’s wrong, and they’ll insist on alterations – it’s a familiar story! Yes, a literary career is a cross to bear!
15 May 1935
In the evening Volf and Veresayev; Volf arrived with tales of the new Metro, which he had liked enormously – he said, ‘I’ve been feeling proud of it all day.’
17 May 1935
Yekaterina Ivanovna [Sergey’s governess], Seryozha and Zhenya [Yelena Sergeyevna’s elder son] and I went on the Metro. It’s been wonderfully done! It’s comfortable and clean and there’s plenty of air. I very much liked the escalator, it’s such fun to stand on a step and slowly be carried upwards.
And then late in the evening Misha and I went on the Metro to the centre, and bumped into Tata and Kolya [Lyamin]. We travelled together to the Kirov station. There’s a huge escalator there, they say it’s seventy-two metres deep. When we reached the top, Tata was laughing and insisting that Misha had looked rather nervous and had been holding on to me; and she thought that was funny. She’s a terrible fool, and she always has this manner of being ironical about something or another!
18 May 1935
At midday Misha gave a reading of the play about Pushkin. [ … ] The Vakhtangov people listened very well, [ … ] they were very sensitive to the humour and were very moved by the ending. [ … ] But the old folk [the Veresayevs] were dissatisfied, he because he couldn’t hear very well.
18 May 1935. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I left you yesterday feeling greatly dispirited. Of course, you were reading a draft which still has to be polished. But I was struck by the fact that you hadn’t considered it necessary to change even those things that we had quite definitely talked about. [ … ] I fear that the true torments of ‘co-authorship’ are only just beginning. Up to now I have intervened in your work only in a minimal way, realizing that any criticism during the process of writing can only undermine the flow of creativity. However, that doesn’t at all mean that I am prepared to content myself with the role of a humble purveyor of material, who does not presume to have any opinion about the quality of the use of that material. [ … ] I would like to hope that the play will nevertheless be called a play by Bulgakov and Veresayev, and that we will manage to reach a successful conclusion, if we only take each other’s views into account.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
20 May 1935
Something staggering has happened: Veresayev has sent Misha an absolutely absurd letter. [ … ] Misha and I both have the same thought, that the old woman has put him up to this. The whole day has been spoiled and work has been disrupted. Misha has been composing a letter to him all day. [ … ] The old man has given me a headache and made me irritable.
20–21 May 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
My dear Vikenty Vikentyevich!
I can only assure you that my astonishment is equal to your dispiritedness. [ … ] You write that you don’t wish to content yourself with the role of a humble purveyor of material. But more than once you have said to me that you would take upon yourself the collating of the material for the play, and would leave to me all the dramatist’s part. And that’s the way we’ve done it.
However, not only did I always make sure that your material was being used in the most accurate way, but each time I conceded modifications in the drafts at the very first objection on your part, regardless of whether it concerned purely historical aspects or dramatic ones. I objected only in those instances where you were unconvincing in dramatic terms. [ … ]
Altogether we have a serious difference over D’Anthès. You write, ‘I find the image of D’Anthès fundamentally incorrect, and as a Pushkin scholar, I cannot take responsibility for it in any way.’
Let me reply to you: I in turn find your image of D’Anthès theatrically impossible. He is so slight, trivial and emasculated that he cannot be set in a serious play. You cannot offer as the murderer of Pushkin, who perished so tragically, a little officer from the ball scene of an operetta. In particular the proposed phrase ‘I will kill him in order to free you of him’ is something D’Anthès cannot utter. [ … ]
As for reaching a successful conclusion, you’re mistaken about that. We already have reached a successful conclusion, at least in the [Vakhtangov] Theatre. The day after the reading I talked with Ruslanov. He spoke of the joy that he and the other listeners had experienced. He spoke, having heard a work that had yet to be finished and polished, of an exceptional success for the author. He lifted my spirits when I felt exhausted. And until I received your letter I was in a very happy frame of mind. But now, I must admit, I am filled with alarm. As I reread your letter and my reply I cannot understand what has provoked all this.
In any case, if we do spoil this success, we will have done it with our own hands, and that will be very sad. Too much back-breaking work has been put into it to wreck a work so casually. [ … ] And all the same I nourish the hope that we will come to some agreement. I wish with all my heart that these letters may sink into oblivion, and that only the play which we have created with such passion should survive.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
21 May 1935
In the evening I visited the Svechins; Irina was released on the 16th at five in the afternoon. She has become limp and apathetic, and has been running a temperature for ten days now. She doesn’t laugh any more.
22 May 1935
Yesterday I lay dozing with a hot-water bottle by my head. Patya [Popov] was sitting with Misha. Suddenly the telephone rang. The old man was proposing that they forget the letters.
28 May 1935
Olga rang: the Theatre does want to perform Molière. ‘There can be no question of handing the play back!’ Vladimir Ivanovich [Nemirovich-Danchenko] has asked me to agree to a deadline of 15 January 1936. It would be impossible to get the play ready any sooner. They’re taking it away from K. S. [Stanislavsky], and leaving it to the team of directors to put it on. Victory!
29 May 1935
Today Misha completed the first draft of Pushkin. The old man came and took a copy, and they agreed that he would come round tomorrow to discuss it.
30 May 1935
At first the conversation was conducted in decidedly sharp tones, and Vikenty Vikentyevich even said that maybe they would have to split up and he would remove his name from the play (retaining, of course, his half of any profits). But then once again he proposed that they make peace.
1 June 1935
Yesterday, on the 31st, there was a reading [of Pushkin]. [ … ] Zhukhovitsky spoke a great deal about Misha’s supreme mastery, but he looked quite crushed. [ … ] I am happy with this play. I know it almost by heart and each time I feel very moved by it.
4 June 1935
We went to the Foreign Section to hand in our forms. They accepted the forms, but said they wouldn’t consider them until we had brought all the documents.
4 June 1935. From Paris to Moscow
From his brother Nikolay
It’s forbidden to send money abroad out of Germany (and any violation is even considered to be treason against the State!) in any significant sums. Apparently it’s possible to send 10–20 marks a week (or a fortnight). Altogether I fear that you should not place any hopes on the money in Germany as long as these prescribed limits exist, for transfers are unbelievably complex and time-consuming and not without risk for the local inhabitants! Adolf seems to be a bit strapped for cash! [ … ] I am deeply grateful to you for the photograph you sent, thanks to which, at last, we were able to feast our eyes on the two of you.
6 June 1935. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
Don’t be afraid – this is a most peaceable letter. I am becoming more and more convinced that there cannot be two bosses with equal rights as far as a single work is concerned. There must be just one boss, and in our case that boss can only be you. [ … ]
It would be so easy to extract ourselves from this dilemma! You called my suggestion that I remove my name from the posters ‘a threat’. It isn’t a threat, but rather a wish to give you your legitimate freedom to express yourself fully. I repeat that I do not consider myself the author of the play, and it was very unpleasant when you obliged me to take a bow with you and share the applause of the people from the Vakhtangov Theatre; and I now feel that my suggestion that we should each have the right to publish the play in our collected works was entirely wrong – of course it must belong only amongst your works. [ … ] At the same time I consider that the play suffers from a whole series of basic defects, which cannot be remedied by individual modifications any more than you can get a tenor to sing bass, however low he might thrust his chin into his collar.
None of this means, of course, that I am refusing you any such assistance as is within my powers, provided that you will accept it as simple advice which places no obligations on you.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
9 June 1935
Nikolay Vasilyevich Yegorov refused to sign a letter saying that the Theatre had no objections to M. A.’s travelling abroad. What a swine! He can’t let a single opportunity go by to play a dirty trick. [ … ] Olya said that Vladimir Ivanovich would probably sign the certificate. And that I should wait.
All right then, we’ll wait.
15 June 1935
Today we went to the Foreign Section and delivered all the papers to them. They accepted them along with 440 roubles. They said the reply would take a month. That’s a long time to wait!
20 June 1935. From Leningrad to Moscow
From Ilya Sudakov (a director at the Moscow Arts Theatre)
Dear Mikhail Afanasyevich!
I beg you to send me your play about Pushkin. I urge you to arrange things so that I should have the opportunity to work on your play in the Moscow Arts Theatre in parallel with the Vakhtangov Theatre. I will organize things inside the Arts Theatre. I need your help as far as your contract with the Vakhtangov is concerned, I don’t know how tied you are to them.
I beg you earnestly to send the play to me in Leningrad. The Astoria. Or, if the worst comes to the worst, to let me have the play at the Kursk station in Moscow when I am on my way to Kislovodsk. I will let you know the day and the time and the number of the train.
I beg you not to give the play to anyone else in Moscow.
23 June 1935. From Moscow to Leningrad
To Ilya Sudakov (a director at the Moscow Arts Theatre)
Dear Ilya Yakovlevich,
I would let you see my play about Pushkin with great pleasure, but unfortunately I cannot do that at present because the play is still being worked on and will be completed only by the end of the summer. [ … ]
As for your desire to work on it in the Moscow Arts Theatre, then this is the situation: point 5 of my contract with the Vakhtangov says that ‘the author undertakes not to give the play to any other Moscow theatre or to publish it before it has been staged at the Vakhtangov Theatre’. As you see, that means that the Vakhtangov has the rights, and if I were to give the play to another theatre then I would have to impose the condition that that theatre didn’t stage it before the Vakhtangov.
9 July 1935. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
I wanted to let you know that I have put in an application to the Foreign Section of the Moscow Regional Executive Committee to be given permission to travel abroad with my wife. I dream of spending even a short time at some resort by the sea, because I am so immensely weary. But I won’t go on about my weariness, since I am tired even of complaining. Apart from that, of course, I can tell that my presence in Paris, however brief, is quite obviously vital for the production of Zoyka’s Apartment. I should get a reply in six or seven days.
26 July 1935. From Moscow to Paris
To his brother Nikolay
Dear Nikol!
I am enclosing a photograph of myself with this letter.
In my previous one I told you I had applied for permission to travel abroad.
Unfortunately I have been refused this.
I will tell you about it in more detail next time.
I kiss you and Ivan.
Your Mikhail.
26 July 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I have been refused permission for my trip abroad (you will clap your hands in astonishment, of course!), and instead of the Seine I find myself on the Klyazma. Well, I suppose it’s a river too …
And so, I await your news and as a friend wish you the best and most precious thing in the world – good health.
1 August 1935. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
On this occasion I was extremely glad to learn that you were strolling along the banks of the Klyazma rather than the Seine, the Tiber or the Arno. I could not imagine how you could snatch three whole months out of the short time that we have left. The play may be a chef-d’oeuvre, but there is still an enormous amount of work to be done on it. After the first two incomparable scenes it goes down and down. The scene of the duel and Pushkin’s death was found deeply disappointing by all the people I’ve read it to, anyway. They say, ‘We couldn’t restrain our tears over the material you had simply assembled in your book, but with this we remain completely unmoved.’ The scene on the Moyka Canal, which should be central, is dreadfully grey, and I’m afraid we’re going to come a cropper over it. I tried to write the scene, but I couldn’t make it work either. Like a sword of Damocles I have hanging over my head ‘that wouldn’t work on stage’, ‘they won’t get the point’, ‘you can’t have conversations with a crowd in the background’. I read the play through several times and it became more and more clear to me that many passages are completely unacceptable. So I decided, to hell with it – and began unceremoniously to rework the whole thing, the way I think it ought to be done. And then we’ll see what comes out: maybe we’ll have two plays that will be quite impossible to reconcile, or maybe we will come to some agreement. [ … ]
Don’t be distressed or angry with me; I have got carried away with the work and am working flat out. I reckon to finish by September. And then we will get together. How? As enemies? Or united by the single wish that the play should come out as well as possible?
2 August 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
Your letter of 1 August has just arrived. I am absolutely shattered. It completely contradicts what you wrote to me on 6 June, when you proposed that I alone should put my name to the play. [ … ]
Now it turns out that you are working away writing a parallel play, one that is quite obviously incompatible with the one that is already written, for which two contracts have been agreed, and which the theatres are waiting for in order to start work on it. [ … ]
Let’s proceed as you suggested: my name alone will go on the play.
I shall await your reply about this with impatience. I feel I must tell you that time will not wait. Other proposals have arrived apart from the Vakhtangov Theatre’s, and precisely in relation to the text that is already written.
I cannot work on a play that is finished, and in any case there’s no need for it. Anyway, it’s quite inconceivable! [ … ]
Vikenty Vikentyevich, why should we part as enemies? It’s unnecessary, and there should be no grounds for it.
16 August 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I have finished studying the material that was handed over to me at your flat. [ … ]
You have gone over the knots of the play, which I had tied with such trouble, over precisely those places where I have avoided head-on attacks, and with the greatest precision you have undone all those knots, after which the costumes simply dropped off the protagonists; and wherever the play had been made most subtle, you have put great fat dots on my ‘i’s. [ … ]
For what you have written is not a play. [ … ]
I beg you to go back to your June letter and proceed as you yourself suggested, that is, give me the opportunity to put the finishing touches to the play (let me repeat again that it is finished), and to deliver it at last to the Vakhtangov Theatre.
You will then look at the final draft, and if as a matter of principle you cannot accept my interpretations, then I alone will put my name to the play. This, as we agreed, will bring no changes in our financial arrangements.
And of course there is absolutely no reason why we should become enemies over this.
The sooner you are able to reply, the easier you will make my work. I am very tired, Vikenty Vikentyevich.
22 August 1935. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I didn’t expect any other reply from you. The basic source of our disagreements is clear to me: it is your chronic blindness to the social aspects of Pushkin’s tragedy. You were powerfully afflicted with this blindness before, but now, flushed with the praise of your supporters, you find it even more difficult to feel the defects of your play in this respect. [ … ]
But what’s the point in going on! We are speaking different languages. There’s just one thing I don’t understand. You are deeply convinced that all the things I have suggested are untheatrical. So why do you protest so insistently against my offering my variants to the Theatre for comparison? The Theatre will reject them with a smile, you will have proved that you are right, and all will be fine.
Over the summer I have tired you out and you have tired me out. We are both ready to hate each other. We have nowhere further to go. Do what you like with the play, deliver it to the Theatre in whatever form you feel appropriate. I for my part will retain the right, inasmuch as it will prove possible for me, to campaign for the removal from your beautiful play of its often astonishingly unnecessary violations of historical truth, and for the strengthening of its social background.
27 August 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
… As for the variants you are proposing: I have no objections to your offering them to the theatres. If you do decide to do it, you should send the variants to the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow and the Krasny Theatre in Leningrad with a letter of explanation and notify me that you have sent them. For my part I will inform the theatres that I categorically refuse to have those variants in the play, since I have concluded that they would be fatally damaging to it.
As for a contract between the co-authors: of course we must draw one up. In view of the fact that by your declaration of hostilities you have created a situation that is difficult and tangled, I will leave it to you to formulate the terms of the contract. We will discuss it, and if there are no differences of opinion we can sign it.
4 September 1935. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
I showed you my variants in draft form, as you could judge from my notes in the margins. They still need to be worked on, but at the moment I find it unpleasant to think about the play. So I will not offer my variants to the theatres. What else do you need for your peace of mind? For me to renounce my ‘campaign’? [ … ] Let me know what is needed to end your distress.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
6 September 1935
Today was the 600th performance of The Turbins. The Theatre sent Misha no congratulations, nor even any notification.
10 September 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
You ask what I need for my peace of mind? Not just for my peace of mind, but for both co-authors and for the good of the play, I believe that the following is essential: that now, when the crucial moment has arrived when the play reaches the Theatre, it is vital that we refrain everywhere, even in letters, from any harsh criticism of each other’s work or any pointed explanations. Otherwise an unhealthy atmosphere may be created around the play, which could threaten the production itself.
Please note that I have very serious grounds for writing this. [ … ]
Along with this letter I am sending to you, and at the same time – in order not to delay – to the theatres, the final text with two names on it. Have a look through it. If you find it appropriate to leave your name on, I will be very glad. If not, then let me know. I will inform the theatres that you have removed your name at your own request.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
11 September 1935
Really, Stanislavsky is a dreadful man. And they have begun to realize that now in the Theatre.
13 September 1935. Moscow
To Nadezhda Radlova (a friend from Leningrad)
Dear Dina!
[ … ] Yes, I finished the play – the one with Veresayev. What a lot of work went into it! It was a tricky thing: Pushkin doesn’t appear once on the stage, but all the action centres upon him, and takes place as much as possible because of him.
Lyusya is now tapping energetically at the typewriter, copying it. I put my hand on Lyusya’s shoulder to restrain her. She has worn herself out and shared all the excitement with me, burrowing into bookshelves with me and turning pale when I was reading it to the actors.
Now we’ll see how fate disposes of this work.
We didn’t go away anywhere. Sergey was living in a dacha outside Moscow and we used to drop in on him, but the rain simply poured down like anything.
We cherished a dream of spending some time abroad and put in an application, but were refused.
And so that’s the summer over, that’s it! And now begins a complicated and important theatrical season. Straight after Pushkin I’ve got to put the finishing touches to a comedy [Ivan Vasilyevich].
I have an impossible amount of work to do.
Sergey has started school, and apart from that I am toying with the idea of making a pianist of him. He’s studying with a good teacher, and plays pieces for four hands with me. We’ll have to see what comes of it.
If you come to Moscow, let’s see something of you! And instruct Kolya [her husband Nikolay] to show himself too!
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
16 September 1935
Olga has returned from Riga. [ … ] She has brought Misha shirts for a tail-coat. In the evening she and Kaluzhsky visited me. Suddenly: Dina Radlova. A conversation about Pushkin, of course. She asked about the contents. Apart from that she talked about Zamyatin, criticizing him for not coming back to the USSR.
20 September 1935
When I came back from the hairdresser’s, Misha said that Zakhava had let him know of the Repertory Committee’s decision to allow Pushkin to be put on. This merits a prayer of thanks to God: at last a joyful day!
24 September 1935
Grisha [Konsky]. In the evening, at his request, Misha read him the first three chapters of the novel [The Master and Margarita]. They produced a quite extraordinary effect on Grisha, and I think he wasn’t shamming. I wept.
2 October 1935
A joyous evening! Misha gave a reading here of Ivan Vasilyevich, with great success. [ … ] Gorchakov was wiping away his tears, and everybody was guffawing.
3 October 1935
This evening Dmitriyev brought Sergey Prokofiev. He made an agreeable impression. There is some question of an opera based on Misha’s play (Pushkin), and he took the text away with him. [ … ] He invited us to his concert tomorrow at the Bolshoy Theatre. He’ll be playing his music for the ballet Romeo and Juliet.
4 October 1935
Prokofiev plays like a real virtuoso. There are marvellous sections in the music. [ … ] Today marks three years since Misha and I registered our marriage.
16 October 1935
This evening – Prokofiev with his wife and Dmitriyev. [ … ] A most interesting conversation about the play. [ … ] Prokofiev is going on tour to Africa, and will return in two months’ time. His wife is staying here.
17 October 1935
Misha was at a rehearsal of Molière. Amazing news about Ivan Vasilyevich. Five people in the Repertory Committee have read the play, and all of them have been hunting to see whether there is anything suspect in it. But they haven’t been able to find anything. Misha said, ‘What on earth are they looking for?’ One marvellous phrase of theirs: ‘Wouldn’t it be possible for Ivan the Terrible to say somewhere that things are better now than they were then?’
18 October 1935
Misha was sleeping during the day when there was a telephone call from the American Embassy, inviting us to watch a film and to a reception given by Bullitt.
29 October 1935
In the evening came a phone call from Verov: Ivan Vasilyevich has been licensed with some slight changes. What joy!
30 October 1935
During the day there was a ring at our door. I went out and there was Akhmatova with such a dreadful face, and so much thinner, that I scarcely recognized her; nor did Misha. It turned out that in one and the same night both her husband (Punin) and her son (Gumilyov) had been arrested. She had come to deliver a letter to Yosif Vissarionovich [Stalin]. She was quite clearly in a confused state and was muttering things to herself.
31 October 1935
Anna Andreyevna [Akhmatova] copied out a letter to Stalin by hand. Then a car came to take her to Pilnyak’s.
Misha read Ivan Vasilyevich to the cast at the Satire Theatre. It was a huge success.
4 November 1935
Akhmatova with a telegram. Punin and Gumilyov had telegraphed to say that they were well. That means they’ve been released. I am delighted for Akhmatova.
7 November 1935
I accompanied Misha in the morning to the Parade [for the anniversary of the Revolution]. Later he told me how the columns crossed the square in a solid wave of several rows. He saw Stalin on the stands in a grey greatcoat and a military cap.
8 November 1935. Moscow
To his friends Marika and Sergey Yermolinsky
Dear Marika and Seryozha,
Wouldn’t you like to go with us to the club today to eat pelmeni [a kind of ravioli]? Come for us at 10 p.m.
If you can’t manage it, drop us a reply.
We’ll be waiting.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
18 November 1935
The first rehearsal of Ivan Vasilyevich.
12 December 1935. Moscow
To the publishers Akademiya
I would like to request the publishers to extend the deadline for my translation of Molière’s L’Avare to 10 January 1936. [ … ]
12 December 1935. From the Atlantic Ocean to Moscow
From his brother Nikolay
Dear Mikhail,
Quite unexpectedly I have been sent on a job to Mexico, and set off for there on 11 December 1935.
I will be in the USA (New York) and will then go by rail to Mexico City, where I have to carry out a task for my boss, Professor F. D’Hérelle.
I will be coming back at the beginning of February. [ … ]
I am writing from mid-ocean. The weather is wintry and greyish, there is fog and a wind and we are rolling a bit.
The French ship of the Champlain line is superb: I am travelling first class in all possible luxury and comfort. I am travelling alone, since it was impossible to find the money for the journey for two.
19 December 1935. Moscow
From the writer Vikenty Veresayev
1) In accordance with your express agreement I have decided to remove my name from our play Aleksandr Pushkin, which I request should henceforth be called simply: M. Bulgakov, Aleksandr Pushkin. I empower you to inform the theatres with whom we have signed contracts of this fact. I will let the Vakhtangov Theatre know myself.
2) In addition to the enclosed formal letter I would like to inform you that my letter to the Vakhtangov Theatre is identical to the letter to you. I am only adding that if my assistance should be needed during the production, then I am at their service.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
21 December 1935
Our life is exceptionally busy. Misha is dictating the translation of L’Avare to me for Akademiya. There are rehearsals of Molière. Our heads are spinning.
22 December 1935. Moscow
To the writer Vikenty Veresayev
Congratulations with all my heart on your splendid anniversary.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
22 December 1935
Before lunch I sent Veresayev a telegram of congratulations; today is his fiftieth [wedding] anniversary. But I don’t want to think about him, he has brought Misha and me so much torment.
3 January 1936
Yesterday Melik[-Pashayev] and Yakov Leontyevich [Leontyev] invited us to the second performance of [Shostakovich’s] Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Yakov Leontyevich sent a car for us. Melik conducts brilliantly. [ … ] Without noticing it, we drank three bottles of champagne [ … ]. Later Melik and Shostakovich joined us. And eventually Dorokhin played a foxtrot on the piano, and I danced with Melik, who told me he was in love with me.
4 January 1936
He [Melik-Pashayev] telephoned Misha and said that the management of the Bolshoy Theatre would like to hear Pushkin, and wanted to bring Shostakovich with them. Prokofiev hasn’t telephoned again since his return from abroad. If they are going to make an opera out of Pushkin, I would rather that Shostakovich did it.
6 January 1936
At two o’clock Yakov Leontyevich [Leontyev], Mutnykh, Shostakovich and Melik-Pashayev came round. At their request Misha read them Pushkin (there’s an idea of making an opera of it). Shostakovich thanked Misha very much, said that he had liked the play very much indeed, and asked for a copy.
Then we had lunch, and our pies were a wild success. We liked Mutnykh very much, he was simple, merry and agreeable. Altogether it was very nice. Shostakovich played his waltz and polka from The Bright Stream, and then Melik also played one of Shostakovich’s waltzes. All three pieces are marvellous!
17 January 1936
We only finished typing out L’Avare yesterday. Misha has been dictating all this time and is terribly tired, me too.
26 January 1936
Yesterday, quite by chance – an American was moving out of our block – I bought Misha a very elegant and original-looking fur coat for a thousand roubles. The fur is grey – American grizzly bear.
Today I opened Pravda while I was still in bed. In it was an unsigned article entitled ‘Cacophony Instead of Music’, containing the most harsh criticisms of Lady Macbeth. The article speaks about ‘a disharmonious, cacophonous torrent’ of sounds, and says that the opera is an expression of leftist deformations. I suppose Shostakovich was mistaken to tackle such a gloomy and painful subject. I can imagine what his feelings must be at the moment! [ … ] Arkadyev has been appointed Party Director at the Arts Theatre.
1 February 1936. From Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s estate) to Moscow
From his friends Pavel Popov and Anna Tolstaya
Dear Mikhail Afanasyevich,
The weather keeps changing from snowstorm to thaw and from thaw to frost, from frost to fierce wind, but we remain in the same peaceful mood and in complete ignorance of what is going on in the wider world, and we sit in our rooms, surrounded by white snow and by the white museum, modestly getting on with our work … Neither of us is tempted to go to Moscow. It’s obvious that we just need to sit quietly here … Will you really not come?
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
February 1936
Yesterday, after innumerable torments, the first, unofficial dress rehearsal of Molière took place. Without the bosses. I saw only Arkadyev, Akulov, Secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and that scoundrel Litovsky.
It wasn’t the show that I had been dreaming of ever since 1930. But Bolduman as Louis XIV and Yanshin as Bouton were excellent. [ … ] People applauded after each scene, and there was loud acclaim at the end. [ … ] After the dress rehearsal we went to a shashlyk restaurant with Melik [-Pashayev], and then on to the Bolshoy to Sadko; M. A. was very keen to listen to some music. [ … ] M. A. has made a definite decision to write a play about Stalin.
Today in Pravda there was an article entitled ‘False Notes at the Ballet’ about The Bright Stream. I feel sorry for Shostakovich, he’s been drawn into hack-work; the authors of the ballet libretto were just trying to please.
8 February 1936
Kolya Lyamin. After he had gone, M. A. said he would like to write a play or a novel called ‘The Prechistenka District’, in order to portray that world of old Moscow which so irritates him.
9 February 1936
Once again a success, and a great one. There were about twenty curtain-calls. The Americans were entranced, and spent a long time thanking us.
11 February 1936
I think there were twenty-one curtain-calls after the end. [ … ] Today in Soviet Art there was an article about Molière by Litovsky, oozing with malice.
Today Stalin’s secretary Poskryobyshev came to see Molière. Olya said that according to the Director he very much enjoyed the performance and said that Yosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] absolutely must see it.
11 February 1936. From Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy’s estate)
To his friends Pavel Popov and Anna Tolstaya
I thought and thought – why not come, after all? But it isn’t to be. I have a lot of troubles and bother at the moment.
After the thaw here we have had another vile, diabolical frost with wind. I detest and curse it.
Of course, if it were possible to be transported without any effort at all to the snowdrifts of Yasnaya Polyana, then I would sit by the fire and attempt to forget both Molière and Pushkin, and the comedy [Ivan Vasilyevich].
No, it’s not possible. I envy you, wish you a good rest and thank you for the invitation. [ … ]
Molière has had his première. The dress rehearsals were on the 5th and the 9th. People are talking of a success. I had to go out and take a bow on both occasions, which I find a torture.
Today in Soviet Art the first arrow was fired in a review by Litovsky. He talks about the play disparagingly, with great malice even if it is relatively restrained, and writes inaccurately about the actors, with one exception.
Ivan Vasilyevich is in rehearsal, but I haven’t been to the Satire Theatre for ages.
I am trying not to think about Aleksandr Sergeyevich [Pushkin], since my commitments are great enough as it is. I gather the Vakhtangov Theatre has started work on it. It clearly won’t be put on at the Moscow Arts Theatre.
I have been feeling unwell, and am so tired that I cannot do a thing: I sit and smoke and dream about felt boots. But I can’t sit around for long; I’m off to the performance this evening (the first closed première).
I send you a friendly hug.
Your Mikhail.
From Yelena Sergeyevna’s diary
16 February 1936
And so, the official premiere of Molière has taken place. How many years we have waited for it! The auditorium was, as Molière puts it, larded with distinguished persons. [ … ] And apart from that, the audience as a whole was rather select, there were lots of academics, doctors, actors and writers. [ … ] It was a huge success. The people in the wings reckoned that there were twenty-two curtain-calls. They were determined to get the author to take a bow. [ … ] After the performance we had to wait a long time for M. A., who was delayed backstage. Akulov had gone there, and said that the show was superb, but – he asked M. A., ‘Will Soviet spectators understand it, is it suitable for them?’
Today, by invitation from the Embassy, we called at 4.30 on the American Ambassador. He has just got back from America. The guests were from the diplomatic corps, and there were just a few Russians. [ … ] Bullitt, as ever, was very courteous, asked all about Molière, and asked to be invited to the show.
18 February 1936
M. A. went to the Arts Theatre at Arkadyev’s invitation to have a talk. [ … ] He said that the conversation was about what M. A. was going to work on next. M. A. replied that the only subject that interested him at present was Stalin. Arkadyev promised to obtain for him the necessary material. M. A. doesn’t believe him.
21 February 1936
During tea in the interval [ … ] Bullitt spoke exceptionally favourably about the play and about M. A. in general, and called him a master.
It was a success. There were just as many curtain-calls; about twenty.
24 February 1936
There was a matinée of Molière, and M. A. and I arrived in time for the end of the performance. In the Arts Theatre newspaper Gorkovets there were negative reviews of Molière by Afinogenov, Vsevolod Ivanov, Olyesha and Gribkov, who writes that the play is ‘superfluous on the Soviet stage’. [ … ] Misha’s destiny is clear to me: he will be alone and persecuted until the end of his days. [ … ] The performance was a resounding triumph; today there were countless curtain-calls. Bolduman said he was being taken out of the part [of Louis XIV] because of [Gorky’s] Enemies, which is running in parallel. The best actor in the play!
27 February 1936
The actor Voloshin telephoned and asked to borrow two thousand. These requests will start coming in now. But we are 17 thousand in debt and don’t have a kopek of current income; we’ve been living on advances.
2 March 1936
In Pravda they are printing one article after another, and one person after another is being sent flying.
4 March 1936
In the evening a conversation with Yegorov in his office to clarify our finances. The Moscow Arts Theatre is demanding the return of three thousand for Flight on the grounds that it has been banned. ‘Just show me the ban,’ I said. [ … ]
Today a competition was announced in the newspaper to write a textbook on the history of the USSR. M. A. said he would like to write a textbook, so we shall have to prepare material, textbooks and atlases. I am astonished at him. In my opinion it’s a completely unrealizable plan.
5 March 1936
At around five there was a telephone call from some woman who gave a false name, hysterically denouncing me to Misha for supposedly having entered into intimate relations with …, and she was shouting that I ought to be punished. Misha passed the receiver to me and I heard her last words: ‘It’s a disgrace, a disgrace, a disgrace!’
How despicable! And of course it’s all completely untrue.
6 March 1936
M. A. was supposed to have a meeting with Arkadyev today, but for some reason it was cancelled.
9 March 1936
‘Here I will enter a large black cross … ’ [a quote from Molière]
In Pravda there was an unsigned article ‘Superficial Glitter and False Content’. When we had finished reading it M. A. said, ‘That’s the end of Molière and the end of Ivan Vasilyevich.’ During the day we went to the Moscow Arts Theatre: Molière has been taken off, and won’t be performed tomorrow. All their faces were different. In the evening a call from Fedya (Mikhalsky): ‘Misha must try to vindicate himself in a letter.’ Vindicate what? Misha won’t write such a letter. [ … ] Everybody is saying the same thing in a friendly fashion – a vindication. He has nothing to vindicate.