Thank you to manuscriptsdontburn.org
Lyubov Belozerskaya-Bulgakova was Mikhail Bulgakov’s second wife– second of three– and was with him during his ‘favored’ years. She wrote a book about her life with him shortly after The Master and Margarita was published for the first time in the USSR.
I expected this book to be a hatchet job on Bulgakov’s character, you know, bitter ex cheated out of a life of fame by a selfish, callous husband… yada yada. Not so. Belozerskaya-Bulgakova is preoccupied with drawing connections between their married life and details of The Master and Margarita; she does this so often it feels a bit labored. However, she also throws in interesting vignettes from their day-to-day life.
As twilight settles on freedom of conscience, privacy and political liberty globally, it’s worth reminding ourselves about the topsy-turvy world Soviet intellectuals lived in during the 1920s. The following excerpt is taken in full, as you would read it on p. 26 of Lyubov’s book if the book is still in your local library. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
“One fine evening”– that is how all stories begin– one unfine evening someone knocked at the door of our Dovecote. (We had no bell.) To my question “Who is it?” came the brisk voice of our landlord: “It’s me, bringing you some guests.”
Two men in civilian clothes stood on the threshold: one with a pince-nez, and one who was just short– Investigator Slavkin and his assistant, with a search warrant. The landlord was along as a witness. Bulgakov wasn’t home and I got worried: how was he going to react to the arrival of these “guests”?
So I asked them not to start the search without the master of the house being present, and said that the would be arriving shortly.
Everybody came into the room and sat down. The landlord lounged in the armchair in the middle. He had a very strong personality, and unrestrained language, especially after a glass or two. Silence. But unfortunately it didn’t last long.
“Have you heard the joke.” began the landlord… (Lord, let this pass, I thought.)
“This Jew is standing on Lubianka Square and a passer-by asks him: ‘Do you know where the National insurance [Gosstrakh, as abbreviated in Russian, with strakh meaning fear by itself] is?’
‘I don’t know about the National Insurance, but the National Horror [gosuzhas, a reference to the Lubianka Prison] is right here.'”
The joke teller shakes with laughter. I manage a feeble smile. Slavkin and his assistant remain silent. The silence continues– then suddenly a familiar knock.
I rushed to the door and whispered to Mikhail Afanasievich {M. A. Bulgakov}:
“Don’t get upset Maka, they’re doing a search.”
But he remained perfectly cool then (he began to twitch much later). Slavkin worked on the book shelves. The “pince-nez” began turning over the arm chairs and poking them with long needles.
And then the unexpected occurred. M. A. said:
“Well, Lyuba, if they shoot up your chairs I’m not going to be held responsible.” (I’d bought these old chairs at a warehouse for confiscated furniture, for three rubles fifty a piece.)
Laughter overcame us. Perhaps it was nervous.
Near morning the yawning landlord asked:
“Why can’t you comrades transfer your activities to the daytime hours?”
No one answered him. As soon as they found Heart of a Dog and the diaries on the shelf the “guests” left.
Heart of a Dog was only returned two years later, at Gorky’s insistence…
Once two men came to the Dovecote. They were both tall, but very different. One was younger than we, the other was much older. The young dark man had dark dreamy eyes, sharp features and a haughty expression. He stooped, in the posture usual for those with weak chests, inclined to tuberculosis. It was difficult to guess his nationality: Georgian, Jewish, Romanian, perhaps Hungarian? The other man was dressed in the usual uniform of those days, a peasant shirt, and looked like a smart engineer.
They turned out to be from the Vakhtangov Theater. The younger one was the actor Vasily Vasilievich Kuza (he died during the bombing, in the first days of the war); the older one was the director Alexei Dmitrievich Popov. They wanted M. A. to write a comedy for the theater.
The resulting play was Zoya’s Apartment, a dark work about a gambling den that reflected poorly on the government but was immensely popular. Eventually the play was banned.
If Bulgakov had been a mediocre talent writing what he wrote, he wouldn’t have been published/performed anywhere. It is much harder to silence someone who people will risk their necks to read– dissident authors who entertain have to be shut up with golden handcuffs, which is how Stalin and the Moscow Art Theater trapped M. A. in the end.
