The Books of My Life: Mikhail Bulgakov

As I mentioned earlier, I have long been interested in Russian culture, and particularly Russian literature and Russian film. It is not surprising, then, that I would end up reading a new biography on one of my favourite Russian writer, one of my favourite writers in general, Mikhail Bulgakov.

Julie Curtis's Mikhail Bulgakov (London: Reaction, 2017) is everything a brief biography aimed at a wider audience should be. Curtis, who teaches Russian literature at Wolfson College, the University of Oxford, and who has written extensively on Bulgakov, tells the tale of Bulgakov's life, briefly summarises a number of Bulgakov's plays, short stories, novellas, and plays,  and succinctly puts Bulgakov's life in to its broader economic, political, and cultural contexts, all in a jargon free way.  Other plusses of Curtis's biography of Bulgakov include the fact that Curtis's book is one of the first English language biographies of Bulgakov that is grounded in archival materials that have only recently been "rediscovered" in Soviet archives including those of the OGPU, one of the predecessors of the KGB, and it contains several excellent and relevant photographs of Bulgakov, his wives, his siblings, his friends, and the home where he grew up in Kiev.

For those of you, by the way, who are interested in reading what many consider to be Bulgakov's masterpiece, Master and Margarita, Curtis recommends three translations, those of Hugh Aplin, Diane Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, and Michael Glenny, the last despite its flaws. She does not recommend the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I recommend reading Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, The White Guard, The Fatal Eggs, and The Heart of a Dog either in the original or in translation as soon as you can if you already haven't.

Highly recommended.