Mikhail Bulgakov is considered one of the finest writers of the 20th century and perhaps the best Russian writer of his era. He wrote “Magical Realism” decades before that genre was coined as a literary form. But much of his work, including his greatest novel: Master and Margarita was only published decades after his death. His plays and novels were highly critical of the communist society he lived in, so he was constantly being censored and kept out of print. Some plays rehearsed for years only to be cancelled the night of opening. In some ways he was lucky. Many of his contemporaries paid with their lives for their work or at least were sent to the gulags in Siberia. But Bulgakov had the odd fate of being the favorite playwright of Joseph Stalin. This was a dubious honor that haunted him. To be loved by a monster. While the dictator’s henchmen made sure Bulgakov worked so little that he almost starved, he was never killed for his insubordinate opinions. As he neared a premature end due to kidney failure (He was originally also a doctor and knew his time was short) he threw himself into writing the most iconoclastic, anti-Soviet, and forbidden fiction he could imagine. Jesus and Pontius Pilate, a very real devil satirizing corrupt communist party officials who were every bit as greedy and licentious as the bourgeoisie, a disgraced writer driven mad, and the heroine who loves him and who will do anything to save him and his writing. This is where fiction and reality begin to blur a bit.
Bulgakov’s wife Yelena (the model for Margarita) kept his work hidden for thirty years after his death and took advantage of a slight thaw in censorship in the 1960’s to get Master and Margarita published. It was immediately banned, but it was also published outside the country; and secret copies of the book were passed from person to person throughout the Soviet Union. This process known as “Samizdat”: carbon copied or handwritten banned books that were secretly read and distributed in the most oppressive police state the world has ever known. The mere act of reading this work of fiction was a crime, but still they persisted; and this most beloved of stories has outlasted the very dictatorship that it mocked, and put Bulgakov in the immortal company of Chekov, Tolstoy, and Gogol.
Master and Margarita is also a hell of a lot of fun. I want to thank my cast and crew, as well as my colleagues and the students from my Russian Theatre course for helping me achieve a lifelong dream of staging this epic story. And most importantly my teacher Anatoly Smelianski who first read Master and Margarita in Yelena Bulgokov’s kitchen when he was a student in the 1960’s. He went on to be the head of the Moscow Art Theatre School where Bulgokov once worked, and where Master and Margarita was finally produced only a few years ago. I also want to thank the Bulgakov estate for granting us rights to stage this production, and Gideon Lester and Janos Szasz who allowed us to further adapt their dramatization which was originally staged at Bard College in the Fisher Center in 2013.