ABSTRACT
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was born into a most orthodox Kiev family: his father taught at the Theological Academy and both his grandfathers were priests. Not surprisingly, most of his family left Russia soon after the October Revolution, while he was being looked at with great suspicion throughout his life by Communist authorities. It therefore created quite a surprise and uproar that in 1965-6 two of his novels, Black Snow: Theatrical Novel and Master and Margarita, were published posthumously. Reading them, especially Master and Margarita, at the time of their publication produced an ‘electrifying’ effect, as if publication itself were due to a stunning oversight (Pevear 1997: vii). The 150,000 copies of the literary journal in which Master and Margarita first appeared were sold out within hours, and people talked about nothing else for weeks. This excitement was repeated with the first book-form edition of the novel, which also included Theatrical Novel and the earlier The White Guard: on the black market the volume fetched 50 times its original price (Curtis 2012: ix). Its very language was different, a breath of fresh air; phrases were passed from ear to mouth, becoming legendary sayings overnight; in particular the sentence, repeated several times in the book, that ‘ “cowardice is the most terrible of vices” ’ (Pevear 1997: viii). The surprise was all the greater as nobody knew about the existence of an entire unpublished Bulgakov novel – and what a major novel: ‘above all, the novel breathed an air of freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia’ (Ibid.). Being unlike anything preceding it, the novel gave rise to intense efforts at decoding, started with the Afterword by A. Vulis to the first edition (Milne 1990: 228), which emphasised its links to the Menippean satire, through Bakhtin (see also Proffer 1996: 98, 117).
