The reader too adapts to this new logic and it is a shock, when you stop to think, to realise that you are no longer surprised. Why, if a man is criticised in January, then of course he will later be shot. Welcome to Moscow, 1938. It is in this atmosphere, in fact this deadly reality, that Mikhail Bulgakov, aged forty-seven, will undertake his most hazardous assignment, and how often – in all honesty – can you say that about a play - wright? Here we join him, a novelist and librettist as well, looking for a theatre to take his work. The stage adaptation of his own novel The White Guard has been a huge success, running at the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre for over eight hundred performances. The success, however, is tainted. He was forced to change the ending (the story of White Russians living in Kiev during the turmoil of the civil war) to make it politically acceptable. Of his other plays, Flight (also featuring White Russians as heroes) is banned, as are Last Days (Pushkin’s battle with the Tsar Nicholas I), Madam Zoyka (a satire on Lenin’s New Economic Policy), and Molière (the playwright’s extinction at the court of Louis XIV).
