BULGAKOV
1891–1940
There is no such thing as a writer who falls silent. If he falls silent it means he was never a true writer.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov, the Soviet writer who was sometimes favored but often banned during his lifetime, left as his legacy one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. The Master and Margarita is a madcap, searing satire of Soviet Russia, defying tyranny and despotism, and a celebration of the ability of the human spirit to triumph over dictatorship.
The plot of The Master and Margarita, which took Bulgakov over a decade to write, is complex and fantastical. In one strand Bulgakov tells how the Devil (Voland, based on Stalin) and his henchmen, including a giant gun-toting cat, wreak havoc in 1930s Moscow, while in another, set in Jerusalem in AD 33, Bulgakov explores Pontius Pilate’s role in the crucifixion of Christ. Meanwhile the Master, a writer persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his novel about this very subject, has retreated to a lunatic asylum, which seemingly offers a saner refuge than the outside world. His mistress, Margarita, refuses to despair, but dances with the Devil to save the Master.
Bulgakov was well aware that his masterpiece could never be published in his lifetime. As well as exploring the complex interplay between good and evil, courage and cowardice, innocence and guilt, the novel champions the freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. Demonstrating the inability of those in power to legislate for the souls of the people they control, Bulgakov’s work fundamentally challenged Stalinist Russia.
The Master and Margarita was first published after Stalin’s death, in magazine installments in 1967. Despite being heavily censored, it was an instant success. Its continued success is living evidence of its own premise that art will triumph over tyranny. In the 1960s Mick Jagger based the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” on the book.
Born in Kiev, the son of a professor, Bulgakov qualified as a physician in 1916 and served as a field doctor with the White Army during the Russian Civil War. Bulgakov was one of a handful of writers including Chekhov, Conan Doyle and Somerset Maugham, to practice medicine, an ideal education in the art of observation. His medical tales, Stories of a Country Doctor, are his best shorter pieces. His refusal to flee his homeland, or to become a mouthpiece for communist propaganda, rendered him, in his own words, “the one and only literary wolf” in the Soviet Union. In his first ten years as a writer, hostile notices outweighed the good by 298 to 3. His plays—even the less controversial adaptations and the historical works that he thought might be allowed to pass unnoticed—were stifled. He himself burned an early draft of The Master and Margarita, temporarily overwhelmed by the futility of writing the unpublishable. In a letter to the Soviet government in 1930, requesting permission to emigrate, Bulgakov outlined the fate he was facing as a banned writer: “persecution, desperation and death.” His contemporaries believed that his death in 1940, from inherited kidney disease, was as much attributable to his treatment by Stalin
He had risen to prominence in post-Revolutionary Russia as a journalist and a playwright for the Moscow Arts Theater. His smash hit Days of the Turbins, an adaptation of his superb Civil War novel The White Guard, was premiered in 1926. Based on Bulgakov’s own happy upbringing in a large and loving upper-middle-class family, Days of the Turbins was the first play since the Revolution to present a sympathetic portrayal of the counter-revolutionary Whites. Under duress, Bulgakov had changed the play’s title and provided an ending loosely sympathetic to the communist cause. It was enough to convince Stalin, who, enjoying its portrayal of family life in the Civil War, interpreted the play as a demonstration of the overwhelming strength of Bolshevism. It became Stalin’s favorite play; he saw it fifteen times.
In the last decade of his life Bulgakov, increasingly ill and disillusioned, had two lifelines. The first was Stalin, who saved Bulgakov from total destitution while at the same time stifling his career. Stalin recognized Bulgakov’s brilliance as much as his political unreliability; if he had known that Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita in secrecy, he would have had him liquidated. After a sinister yet encouraging personal phone call from the tyrant to Bulgakov, his favorite play became part of the Moscow Arts Theater’s repertoire: Stalin secured him a position as assistant director. Bulgakov’s second lifeline was his third wife, Yelena Sergeyevna, the model for Margarita, whose unconditional love sustains and saves the persecuted Master. Yelena ensured the survival of Bulgakov’s masterpiece, safeguarding the manuscript until its publication just before her death in 1970.
Bulgakov was not a dissident as such: he survived in Stalinist Russia in order to write. He was in this sense an ordinary writer, not a political campaigner. Like the other creative geniuses of Stalinist Russia—the poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, the poet-novelist Boris Pasternak (author of Dr. Zhivago), the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the novelist Vasily Grossman (author of Life and Fate, another work that survived to undermine tyranny)—he made his compromises with the system in order to survive (though Mandelstam was finally crushed after his scabrous poetic attack on Stalin himself). Indeed, he wrote the play Batumi about Stalin’s youthful exploits to celebrate the dictator’s 60th birthday in 1939. When Stalin rejected the play, Bulgakov’s health collapsed and he died soon afterward. Stalin himself boasted “we even got Bulgakov to work for us.”
Many other writers were killed by Stalin, yet as Bulgakov famously wrote: “Manuscripts don’t burn!”
FRANCO
1892–1975
I am responsible only to God and history.
General Franco
General Francisco Franco, the generalissimo of Spain from 1939 to 1975, is in some ways the forgotten tyrant, his deeds overshadowed by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, yet he was truly one of history’s monsters. In the 1930s, this fascistic warlord won power with brutality and terror in a savage civil war, aided by his ally Hitler, and proceeded to terrorize the civilian population of Spain for twenty-five years. As democracy thrived in the rest of western Europe following the Second World War, his brutal military dictatorship continued to crush dissent, and to shoot and torture his supposed enemies.
Franco was born in northwest Spain in 1892, in the naval city of Ferrol. His mother was a pious and conservative upper-middle-class Catholic; his father a difficult and eccentric man who expected his son to follow him into the navy. Due to naval cutbacks, however, at just fourteen years old, Franco entered the army instead. Fiercely professional, he soon carved out his reputation as a brave and driven soldier, becoming a captain in 1916 and the youngest general in Spain in 1926, at age thirty-four.
Although staunchly loyal to the monarchy, Franco was not overtly involved in politics until 1931, when the Spanish king abdicated, leaving the government in the hands of left-wing republicans. When the conservatives won power back two years later, they identified Franco as a powerful potential ally and promoted him to major general, instructing him to suppress an uprising by Asturian miners in October 1934. Election victory for the left-wing Popular Front in 1936, however, saw Franco effectively demoted and sent to the Canary Islands, but just months later the right-wing Spanish nationalist bloc called on the army to join them in rebellion against the government, which had failed to stabilize the country. The Spanish Civil War had begun.