PARTISAN REVIEW
537
stage author, and the prose sketch of the same piece contains, for no
particular reason that I can see, Kipling's Riki-Tiki-Tavi. Bulgakov's
most famous short story, a bit of science fiction entitled "The Fatal
Eggs," is drawn quite unblushingly from H.
G.
Wells's
The Food of the
Gods.
The
Diaboliad,
a story about a little government clerk who is
caught up in the idiocies of the civil service and driven first to insanity
and then to suicide as a result of some trivial offense against a superior,
could not exist apart from its altogether obvious dependence upon
Gogol and Dostoevski.
It
may have 'been his recurrent defeats at the
hands of the censorship, and the need to eat, that drove Bulgakov to
make his numerous adaptations for the stage (of
Dead Souls, Don
Quixote,
and so on), but it is also pretty clear that he tended by nature
to 'be an adapter.
Of all the characters of earlier fiction, the one who returns most
often to Bulgakov's modem world is the Prince of Darkness. This is the
basis for his Faustian novel,
The Master and Margarita,
but the devil,
variously disguised, is almost as ubiquitous in his work as in that of his
principal model, Gogol. Zoya, the enterprising bitch who manages to
hold onto her "living space" in the play
Zoya's Apartment
by turning
it into a zany whorehouse
cum
opium den, is explicitly called "the
devil," but we hardly need this to recognize her for what she is. Bul–
gakov's message to
his
audience and his various overseers could not
have been clearer: the kingdom of darkness is at hand, and it is you
who have brought it aibout. It is not obscured by his wild genius for the
absurd nor by his penchant for putting his own life and the works of
other writers onto the stage in large unmetabolized chunks.
The amazingly energetic Proffers, who seem to be carrying on a
one-family effort to ventilate the study of Russian literature in the U.S.
(they more or less single-handedly publish a new journal,
Russian Lit–
erature Triquartely,
which combines articles of academic respectability
with hilarious and irreverent trivia) have done a generally excellent job
of editing. The introductions and commentaries derive from a fresh
examination of all the Bulgakov materials they could lay their hands on
in Moscow, and they strike me as particularly fine: authoritative, suc–
cinct, unpretentious, and just what the reader needs. For the usual rea–
sons, Bulgakov's manuscripts are in a generally terrible disarray. Two
different versions of his great novel appeared in English at the same
time, and the plays were so tampered with Iby directors like Stanislavsky
that it is difficult now to separate the authentic from the spurious.
There are even competing versions of his greatest success,
The Days
of the Turbins,
and that mlli)' account for the longish omission that I
