Heart of a Dog

Literature & Fiction

Bulgakov, Mikhaïl

Humor & Satire

HARCOURT, BRACE

I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one ever seemed to sleep, and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories of their culture and their ancestors and their ongoing lives. Bulgakov taught me to hear something in those stories that I had not yet clearly heard. One could call it, in terms that would soon thereafter gain wide currency, "magical realism". The deadpan mix of the fantastic and the realistic was at the heart of the Vietnamese mythos. It is at the heart of the present zeitgeist. And it was not invented by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as wonderful as his One Hundred Years of Solitude is. Garcia Marquez's landmark work of magical realism was predated by nearly three decades by Bulgakov's brilliant masterpiece of a novel. That summer in Saigon a vodka-swilling, talking black cat, a coven of beautiful naked witches, Pontius Pilate, and a whole cast of benighted writers of Stalinist Moscow and Satan himself all took up permanent residence in my creative unconscious. Their presence, perhaps more than anything else from the realm of literature, has helped shape the work I am most proud of. I'm often asked for a list of favorite authors. Here is my advice. Read Bulgakov. Look around you at the new century. He will show you things you need to see.

Master and Margarita

Glenny, Michael (translator)

Literary

Harper&Row

When Maxudov's novel fails, he attempts suicide. When that fails, he dramatises his novel. To the resentment of literary Moscow, the play is accepted by the Independent Theatre. Maxudov plunges into a world of inflated egos, but each rehearsal sees less chance of the play being performed.

BLACK SNOW: A Theatrical Novel (Flamingo)

HarperCollins, Publishers

The ultimate back-stage novel and a brilliant satire by the author of The Master and Margarita on his ten-year love-hate relationship with Stanislavsky, Method Acting and the Moscow Arts Theatre.

Black Snow

Vintage, UK

A country doctor's notebook

Brilliant stories that show the growth of a novelist's mind, and the raw material that fed the wild surrealism of Bulgakov's later fiction. With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr. Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone doctor in a vast country practice — on the eve of Revolution — is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.

A Country Doctor's Notebook

Classics

Vintage Classics

Written during the darkest most repressive period of Stalins reign this novel gives substance to the notion of artistic and religious freedom Despite its devastating satire of Soviet life and its audacious portrayals of Christ and Satan the manuscript had somehow eluded Russian censors and the enthusiasm of its readers assured the novel immediate and enduring success The New York Times Book Review calls this one of the truly great Russian novels of this century

The Master and Margarita (Vintage Magic)

A theatrical novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, a famous Soviet playwright and novelist. It is a very remarkable back-stage novel, the brilliant, savage-bitter outcome of Bulgaklov's ten-year love-hate relationship with Stanislavsky, the "Method" and the Moscow Art Theatre.

Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel

Penquin

A new translation of one of the most popular satires on the Russian Revolution and Soviet society Best known for The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov is one of twentieth-century Russia's most prominent novelists. A Dead Man's Memoir is a semi- autobiographical story about a writer who fails to sell his novel, then fails to commit suicide. When the writer's play is taken up for production in a theater, literary success beckons, but he is not prepared to reckon with the grotesquely inflated egos of the actors, directors, and theater managers.

A Dead Man's Memoir: A Theatrical Novel (Penguin Classics)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Penguin Classics

This is Bulgakov's surreal tale of a Moscow doctor who befriends a stray dog and performs on it a human transplant - with disastrous consequences.

A Dog's Heart: An Appalling Story

Penguin Classic

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a fiercely satirical fantasy that remained unpublished in its author's home country for over thirty years. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil - to say nothing of his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat, to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev - is very much alive. As death and destruction spread through the city like wildfire, condemning Moscow's cultural elite to prison cells and body bags, only a madman, the Master, and Margarita, his beautiful, courageous lover, can hope to end the chaos. Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign and circulated in samizdat form for decades, when The Master and the Margarita was finally published it became an overnight literary phenomenon, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. This luminous translation from the complete and unabridged Russian text is accompanied by an introduction by Richard Pevear exploring the extraordinary circumstances of the novel's composition and publication, and how Bulgakov drew on carnivalesque folk traditions to create his ironic subversion of Soviet propaganda. This edition also contains a list of further reading and a note on the text. After finishing high school, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) entered the Medical School of Kiev University, graduating in 1916. He wrote about his experiences as a doctor in his early works Notes of a Young Country Doctor. His later works treated the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical characters, but The Master and Margarita is generally considered his masterpiece. If you enjoyed The Master and Margarita, you might like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, also available in Penguin Classics. 'One of the great novels of the 20th century, a scary, darkly comic allegory' Daily Telegraph

Penguin Classics Master and Margarita

History & Criticism

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