Manuscripts Don't Burn by J. A E Curtis

Author:J. A E Curtis [CURTIS, J. A. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO007000, LCO014000
ISBN: 9781468301397
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

1936–1940

Yelena Sergeyevna began her diary entry for 9 March 1936, when Bulgakov’s play Molière was taken off, with a quotation from the play: ‘Here I will enter a large black cross … ’ One of the characters in Molière is the faithful actor Lagrange, known as Registre because he kept a record of the main events affecting Molière’s troupe, which he adorned with mysterious symbols as appropriate. The ‘large black cross’ is inscribed in the record by Lagrange in the closing lines of the play to mark Molière’s death. Certainly, the impact of the loss of Molière, soon followed by those of Pushkin and Ivan Vasilyevich, had the effect on Bulgakov of a grievous bereavement. During the late spring of 1936 there were tentative conversations about resurrecting both Molière and Pushkin, but only on condition that Bulgakov make various changes to the texts; and he, by now entirely disillusioned by these proposals for cosmetic changes that would suddenly make everything all right, categorically refused. In May an official from the Party Central Committee attended a dress rehearsal of Ivan Vasilyevich and banned it on the spot.

Bulgakov and Yelena Sergeyevna decided to get away from Moscow for a time, and spent the first two weeks of June in Kiev – although to finance even this modest expedition Bulgakov was obliged to agree to a new contract with the Moscow Arts Theatre for an adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor. On their return from Kiev they were greeted with a proposal from the Leningrad composer Boris Asafyev for Bulgakov to write the libretto for an opera – for the Bolshoy Theatre – on the subject of Minin and Pozharsky, the leaders of a seventeenth-century uprising to liberate Moscow from the Poles. This latter project quite appealed to Bulgakov, who now attended the opera and the ballet or concerts rather more frequently than the theatre. He set to and finished the libretto by the middle of July, before going away once more on holiday, this time together with a group from the Arts Theatre, to Sukhumi on the Black Sea. There he began to tackle The Merry Wives, beginning with an attempt to translate Shakespeare’s linguistically very demanding opening scene; but as Yelena Sergeyevna recorded, the tactless and overbearing manner of Nikolay Gorchakov, who had worked as a director on both Molière and Ivan Vasilyevich, caused Bulgakov’s patience to snap. He and Yelena Sergeyevna flew back to Moscow (the only time Bulgakov travelled by aeroplane, so far as we know), and within days of their return Bulgakov sent in his resignation to the Moscow Arts Theatre and broke off his contract with them for The Merry Wives of Windsor. Six years after the telephone conversation with Stalin that had earned him the one job he had said he really wanted if he was going to stay in the USSR, Bulgakov now parted company with the Arts Theatre on the most acrimonious terms, carrying away with him a scornful, bitter dislike for the Theatre’s two founders, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko.

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