Kirjahaku

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, set in Stalin's Moscow, is an intriguing work with a complex structure, wonderful comic episodes and moments of great beauty. Readers are often left tantalized but uncertain how to understand its rich meanings. To what extent is it political? Or religious? And how should we interpret the Satanic Woland? This Reader's Companion offers readers a biographical introduction, and analyses of the structure and the main themes of the novel. More curious readers will also enjoy the accounts of the novel's writing and publication history, alongside analyses of the work's astonishing linguistic complexity and a review of available English translations.

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, set in Stalin's Moscow, is an intriguing work with a complex structure, wonderful comic episodes and moments of great beauty. Readers are often left tantalized but uncertain how to understand its rich meanings. To what extent is it political? Or religious? And how should we interpret the Satanic Woland? This Reader's Companion offers readers a biographical introduction, and analyses of the structure and the main themes of the novel. More curious readers will also enjoy the accounts of the novel's writing and publication history, alongside analyses of the work's astonishing linguistic complexity and a review of available English translations.

_______________'Curtis spent a decade trying to negotiate her way past possessive Soviet archivists, and the result of her persistence is the most comprehensive selection of personal documents so far available in any language' - Simon Franklin, Times Literary Supplement'Ingeniously structured ... an absorbing and, at times, uplifting book' - Robert Russell, Modern Language Review'An engaging and readable story of a life which wears its scholarship lightly ... Rich and exciting material' - Jane Grayson, Slavonic and East European Review'Produces a lovely collage effect, the verbal equivalent of the photo album or scrapbook' - Laura D. Weeks, Russian Review_______________A reissued edition of the definitive biography of Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and MargaritaThe Russian playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) is now widely acknowledged as one of the giants of twentieth-century Soviet literature, ranking with such luminaries as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. In his own lifetime, however, a casualty of Stalinist repression, he was scarcely published at all, and his plays reached the stage only with huge difficulty. His greatest masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, a novel written in the 1930s in complete secrecy, largely at night, did not appear in print until more than a quarter of a century after his death. It has since become a worldwide bestseller. In Manuscripts Don't Burn, J.A.E. Curtis has collated the fruits of eleven years of research to produce a fascinating chronicle of Bulgakov's life, using a mass of exciting new material - much of which has never been published before. In particular, she is the only Westerner to have been granted access to either Bulgakov's or his wife Yelena Sergeyevna's diaries, which record in vivid detail the nightmarish precariousness of life during the Stalinist purges. J.A.E Curtis combines these diaries with extracts from letters to and from Bulgakov and with her own illuminating commentary to create a lively and highly readable account. Her vast collection of Bulgakov's correspondence is unparalleled even in the USSR, and she draws on it judiciously to include letters addressed directly to Stalin, in which Bulgakov's pleads to be allowed to emigrate; letters to his sisters and to his brother in Paris whom he did not see for twenty years; intimate notes to his second and third wives; and letters to and from well-known writers such as Gorky and Zamyatin. Manuscripts Don't Burn provides a forceful and compelling insight into the pressures of day-to-day existence for a man fighting persecution in order to make a career as a writer in Stalinist Russia.

This volume explores the life and work of Evgeny Zamiatin, whose renown abroad has largely been shaped by his anti-utopian novel We, completed in 1919-20. After his death in 1937, he seemed fated to disappear into obscurity in the West, at the same time as he was being airbrushed out of Soviet literary history at home. George Orwell, who readily acknowledged that reading We had contributed to his own ideas for 1984, together with Professor Gleb Struve, set out to secure Zamiatin’s reputation after the Second World War. It would be sixty-five years after its initial publication that the novel finally became available to Russian readers at home, at the very end of the Soviet era. Only now has We been recognised in Zamiatin’s own country as a defining text, warning of the political and technological dangers of the coming century.

After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia's northern capital for nearly twenty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writings have gradually been rediscovered in Russia, but with his archives scattered between Russia, France, and the USA, the project of reconstructing the story of his life has been a complex task. This book, the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, draws upon his extensive correspondence and other documents in order to provide an account of his life which explores his intimate preoccupations, as well as uncovering the political and cultural background to many of his works. It reveals a man of strong will and high principles, who negotiated the political dilemmas of his day-including his relationship with Stalin-with great shrewdness.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) has become the most popular Russian writer of the twentieth century, even though his works were banned for decades after his death due to the repressive Soviet censorship of literature. His great novel, The Master and Margarita (published only in 1973), was written in complete secrecy during the 1930s for fear of the writer being arrested and shot. In her revelatory new biography J.A.E. Curtis provides a fresh account of Bulgakov’s idyllic childhood and youth in Kiev, which was swept away in the turmoil of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and Civil War.Early biographies of Bulgakov were limited in scope by the difficulty of gaining access to archives in the ussr in the 1970s and ’80s. Since that time archives have become more accessible, and Curtis makes use of newhistorical documents, tracing Bulgakov’s absolute determination to establish himself as a writer in Bolshevik Moscow, his three marriages and his triumphs as a dramatist in the 1920s. They also reveal how he struggled to defend his art and preserve his integrity in Russia, and the intensely close interest Stalin took in Bulgakov’s work, personally weighing up each time whether his plays should be permitted or banned.Based upon many years of research, and taking in previously unpublished family papers and Soviet Politburo discussions, this is an absorbing account of the life and work of one of Russia’s most inventive and exuberant novelists and playwrights.