Bulgakov: Flight

This is a title in the Bristol Classical Press Russian Texts series, in Russian with English notes, vocabulary and introduction. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) is well-known for his novel, “The Master and Margarita”, published posthumously in the 1970s. In his own life he was best known as a playwright, with plays running at several of the leading theatres in Moscow during the 1920s and 1930s. “Flight” takes as its subject the defeated Whites as they flee the Reds and emigrate to Constantinople and Paris. The play was too politically controversial to be staged in Bulgakov’s lifetime. Couched in the form of eight “dreams” rather than conventional scenes, it hovers between tragedy and comedy.