The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (37 page)

“Can you write a Soviet detective novel? You would have mass circulation, be translated into every world language; lots of money, hard currency. Should I give you an advance now?” Bulgakov refused the offer, saying, “No, I can’t write this.” When he read the first three chapters Angarsky said, “Well, we can’t publish that.” “Why not?” “Because we can’t.”

Bulgakov called
The Master and Margarita
his “sunset novel,” marking the end of his literary career.
666
That spring, Elena frequently mentioned “the novel” in her diary. There was no hope of getting it published, but Bulgakov was revising it and driving himself hard. At the end of May, asking Olga to take over the final typing of the novel, Elena left for the town of Lebedyan on the Don River, with Sergei in tow. They settled in a rented cottage shared with relatives. From their scorching apartment, Bulgakov wrote letters daily; it was their second time apart in six years. His days were taken with rehearsals of Glinka’s opera
Ivan Susanin
, a Soviet version of what had been known as
A Life for the Czar
. At night, he revised the chapter about Pontius Pilate. “Ah, what difficult, confusing material!”
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Beginning to dictate to Olga, an expert typist who could withstand long hours without making slips, Bulgakov was afraid to interrupt for a single day. “The novel must be finished! Now! Now!”
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Working at a furious pace, they succeeded in typing the new version, minus the final chapters, by mid-June.

“And what will come out of it?” you ask. I don’t know. Perhaps, you will put it away in the bureau or in the cupboard where the corpses of my plays lie, and at times you will
remember it. However, we cannot know our future.… I have already made my judgment of this work and if I manage to improve the ending I will think that it deserves proofreading and storing it in the darkness of the desk drawer. For the moment I am interested in your opinion, and nobody can tell whether I will ever know my readers’ verdict.
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Olga, Bulgakov’s “estimable typist,” was a harsh judge, he wrote Elena, having smiled only once during the entire work, to the words “the lovely seaside.” Even satirical scenes of their contemporary Moscow left her unmoved. Realizing that it was unpublishable, Olga uttered an “enigmatic” phrase: “This novel—is your private business.” Bulgakov’s “only joyous dream” was meeting Elena at the cottage, but lately he had begun to feel unwell, suffering from excruciating headaches and exhaustion. “I’m buried underneath this novel.… I’ve become completely withdrawn, and would be able to open myself up only to one person, but she isn’t here! She is growing sunflowers!”
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In a photograph she sent Bulgakov, Elena stands in the doorway of their country cottage, in a kerchief, looking at Sergei, who is behind the rock fence of their small garden.

After completing the novel in June and spending a month with Elena, Bulgakov was back in Moscow, writing an adaptation of
Don Quixote
for the Vakhtangov Theater. He was practicing Spanish and reading Cervantes in the original, and, to amuse Elena, was sending Spanish missives to her along with his Russian translation. He wrote in July that he imagined her “particularly vividly. If only I could sit and talk to you now!”
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He hadn’t read the Quixote play to anybody and would not read it until they made a clean copy together. In mid-August, they reunited in Moscow where a basket of flowers awaited Elena.

In the fall, the Repertoire Committee passed the Quixote play. But soon after, the play and its author were attacked in an abusive article. The critic’s name, like the names of his other tormentors, would only be remembered in literary history in connection with Bulgakov; he pasted their scornful articles on the walls of their
apartment. His critics continued to harass him because of his refusal to conform and because many were envious of his talent. The couple was in a “murderous” mood: even though Bulgakov had written twelve plays and was working without letup, they were still hard up.

In October, when the Arts Theater celebrated its fortieth anniversary, there was not a single mention of
The Turbins
and Bulgakov in the newspapers; by then, the play had been performed eight hundred times. “This is persecution by silence,” Elena remarked.
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The theater director Nemirovich and actors valued Bulgakov and wanted him back, but were afraid to mention him in the interviews. That fall, the theater directors and staff were showered with awards and money.

Stalin’s sixtieth birthday was to be celebrated in December 1939, and theaters across the country competed for good plays about the leader. Envoys from the Arts Theater came to persuade Bulgakov to write a play about Stalin. “And since the plays of the other authors are extremely weak,” observed Elena with glee, “they are hoping that Misha will bail them out.”
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Back in 1936, after the ban of
Molière
, Bulgakov had told his theater colleagues that Stalin was the only topic that interested him at present. But he needed archival materials for this play and realized that they could not be obtained. Shortly after this comment, Elena was at the Bolshoi and saw Stalin in his the government box: “I kept thinking about Stalin and dreaming that he would think of Misha, and our fate would be transformed.”
674

This was also the message of the Arts Theater envoys, who repeatedly told Bulgakov that the Stalin play would change his life and career. Visiting the couple in December 1938 and early in the New Year, they would sit all night, urging him to write the play. In addition, Nikolai Erdman advised him to do it, speaking so persuasively that Bulgakov compared him to a “sermonizing local archpriest.”

In December, when Bulgakov was at home with flu, the couple was sorting out his archive. The spectacle of his banned plays so depressed Bulgakov that he told Elena he did not want to live.
She agreed that it was impossible to live and work without seeing the results. By then, he had a plan for the play about Stalin and described the first scenes to Elena. The play would be about Stalin’s revolutionary youth in Georgia. Bulgakov had a premonition, however, that writing this play and getting into the spotlight was “too risky” for him and that it would all end badly.
675
Yet he was soon drafting the play.

Elena assumed her usual role, cheering Bulgakov onward: she loved the opening scenes, found that his play was artistically superior to existing ones on the subject, and felt that his characters sounded genuine. She believed their luck was about to turn; but for the first time, they were not together on this. Bulgakov remained cheerless, saying it was his last play, as earlier he had said
The Master and Margarita
was his last novel. In mid-July, Elena recorded chilling news: actress Zinaida Reich had been brutally murdered at her house, weeks after the arrest of her husband, director Meyerhold. After Meyerhold’s Theater was shut down, Zinaida had written a critical letter to Stalin for his interference in the arts; this letter was believed to have sealed the couple’s fate.

In summer 1939, Bulgakov was completing the play, which he named
Batum
, and Elena was energetically typing it. Even before it was licensed, requests began to pour in from many theaters. Directors vowed to challenge the exclusive right of the Arts Theater to produce
Batum:
“The entire country has to perform it!” Olga phoned to say that Nemirovich called Bulgakov “a marvelous playwright,” and loved the main character. “I don’t know how much of it is true and how much is false,” Elena wondered on August 8, referring to the praise. The very newspapers that had harassed Bulgakov now wanted preliminary information about
Batum
, but Elena said they would have to wait.

Bulgakov’s play was being read by Stalin, and the theater people expected his approval. The Arts Theater decided to rehearse the play in Batumi, a Georgian resort and the place where young Stalin had organized strikes before the Revolution. The Bulgakovs were to travel with the theater, and Elena was looking forward to their
vacation by the Black Sea. Bulgakov asked her to postpone the trip, a request she dismissed, writing in her diary on August 14 that she could barely wait to go, “Is it possible we’re leaving tomorrow! I can’t believe my happiness.”

On the train, the theater company had a banquet to prematurely celebrate Bulgakov’s success: Elena served pies, pineapples in cognac, and other dainties. At the first station, a postwoman handed a telegram to Bulgakov. He turned white. The telegram said there was no need for the theater to travel further. When later that day they returned home, Bulgakov was in “a dreadful state.” Pacing the dim rooms (he could not bear light), he was nervously rubbing his hands and saying the place smelled of a corpse, “maybe, that’s the dead play?” Elena learned on the phone that the play had met with disapproval at the very top: it was unacceptable to turn Stalin into a fictional character. In addition, Bulgakov was accused of insincerity for having obviously written the play to revive his career. Later, the theater people told Elena that Stalin liked the play but still did not want it produced. Bulgakov’s prophecy that
Batum
would be his last play came to pass. On August 27, inundated with phone calls from theaters and film studios asking about the play, Elena had to tell everyone it had been banned. She was even more troubled with Bulgakov’s condition: “Misha feels crushed.… It’s never been like this before.” It was a double blow for Bulgakov, whose attempt at political compromise ended in humiliating defeat.

In early September, newspapers were full of reports about Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but world events reached Elena through a haze. She was struck with Bulgakov’s grave illness. She took him to Leningrad for a change of air, but they had to return immediately because he was losing his sight. In Moscow, specialists diagnosed him with nephrosclerosis, the kidney disease related to hypertension that had killed his father. The doctors’ prognosis was that he had only days to live. Bulgakov, who had trained as a doctor and had studied this illness, disagreed and told Elena he would live another six months.

During these final months, suffering severe headaches and nearly blind, Bulgakov rarely left the house. On their few outings together he wore dark glasses and a black skullcap, which Elena had made for him, the same as the one on his literary hero, the Master. She spent days by his bedside, reading to him from the manuscript of
The Master and Margarita
and taking down his final revisions. Acquaintances visiting the Bulgakovs described Elena as completely altered, with deep sadness in her eyes. Olga wrote their mother in Riga that Elena continued to believe Bulgakov would recover and was determined to fight for his life. “‘I won’t give him up,’ she says, ‘I won’t let him die.’ Her love for him is so deep that it doesn’t seem like a normal feeling between spouses who have already lived many years together.”
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In the ending of
The Master and Margarita
, which Bulgakov then dictated to her, the writer and his wife retire to a symbolic refuge where they are granted eternity and peace. When Bulgakov bade farewell to Elena, he told her, “You were everything to me, you replaced the whole planet. In my dream we were together on the planet.… My … star, that always beaconed to me in my earthly life! You loved all of my works, I wrote them for you.…” Twenty years later, in a letter to his brother Nikolai, she recalled:

My place was on a cushion on the floor next to his bed. He held my hand all the time.… On March 9 at about three in the afternoon the doctor said that he wouldn’t live more than another two hours.… The night passed. On the morning of the 10th he was sleeping or slipping in and out of consciousness, and his breathing became faster, warmer and more even. And I suddenly thought, like a madwoman, that the miracle I had kept promising myself had come to pass.…

Bulgakov was lying on a mattress with only a towel around his hips: the mere touch of clothing on his skin gave him excruciating pain. During his final days he could barely speak, and she alone could guess the endings of his words.

“The Master and Margarita?”
I asked, thinking that he was referring to the novel. “I promise you that I will submit it, I will get it published!” He listened attentively and said, “So that they would learn.… ”
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Bulgakov was forty-eight when he died on March 10. The following morning, there was a call from Stalin’s secretariat: “Is it true that comrade Bulgakov has died?” Bulgakov’s friend, scriptwriter Sergei Ermolinsky, who took the call, replied that it was true, and the caller hung up.
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Before the funeral, prominent sculptor Sergei Merkurov came to take Bulgakov’s death mask. (Merkurov had made death masks of prominent writers and politicians, including Leo Tolstoy and Lenin.)

In June, Elena wrote to her mother, in Riga, “I lived with Misha’s life and creative work. I’ve suddenly lost everything.”
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During his final months, Bulgakov told Elena, “When I die, they’ll soon start to print me, theaters will snatch my plays from each other, and everywhere they’ll start to invite you to give talks about your recollections of me.”
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He would go on describing how she would appear on stage in a black dress with a deep décolleté and begin reminiscing. Although he was saying this half-seriously, his words would discourage Elena from giving talks about Bulgakov.

Five days after his death, she received a letter from the influential writer Alexander Fadeev, future head of the Writers’ Union. Having visited Bulgakov when he was ill, impressed with his talent and character, Fadeev had written a tribute to him: “Both political people and literary people know that he was a man who did not burden himself, in his art or in his life, with political lies, that his path was sincere.…”
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The letter was the first official endorsement of Bulgakov’s career. Shortly after, when the Writers’ Union set up a committee to oversee Bulgakov’s literary heritage, Elena asked Fadeev to chair it. She prepared Bulgakov’s collection of plays for publication, but even Fadeev, despite his contacts in the Party, could not push it through censorship. Literary encyclopedias of the time described Bulgakov as a class enemy whose writings had ridiculed
and discredited Soviet reality; they quoted Stalin’s criticism of his play
Flight
.