I need to read more Bulgakov, having only read the one.
The other two novels I mentioned to movingfinger are satirical science fiction; I read the copies that were in my parents' house. I don't know if The Fatal Eggs should have reminded me of Daniel Pinkwater's The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, but if we can find a third mad science chicken disaster story I'm calling it a genre—an electrical ray is discovered that accelerates embryonic growth and development, so it's used to speed up chicken production in the wake of a devastating sort of bird flu that's wrecked the USSR's poultry reserves, but then someone irradiates the wrong batch of eggs and next thing you know Moscow is under siege from enormous anacondas and the media is closely monitoring the engagement of crack troops of cavalry with monstrous ostriches in the Caucasus. It has nearly the same ending as The War of the Worlds, but snarkier. In Heart of a Dog, an expensive surgeon accidentally raises a dog to human sentience by grafting it with the endocrine system of a recently deceased man—as it turns out, a balalaika-playing petty criminal who died in a barroom brawl—thus transforming a rather sweet-tempered stray into a swaggering, swearing, skirt-chasing, somewhat short and hairy young man who proceeds to drive his former owner nearly out of his mind, especially since he doesn't just get a job on the housing committee and needle the conservative doctor about his extra living space, he trashes the apartment chasing a cat and brings home fleas. It's really tempting to describe it as a cross between The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Odd Couple. I don't know if they're lesser novels, but they're very different both tonally and structurally from The Master and Margarita; on all levels, they're less complicated.
The more I read of Bulgakov's work, the more impressed I am with John Hodges' Collaborators, because the relationship it bears to the historical end of Bulgakov's life is very like the relationship of these pieces I'm reading now to the details of his early life and career: a kind of nervy, fevery shadow-show of the facts, full of hectic details and cut time, never straightforwardly anything. The absurdism of the funnier stories never quite tips over into the fantastic (where it would be less unsettling), but hovers on the borderline where you can't tell if an office that relocates without telling its employees is a Kafkaesque joke, an early mental health warning, or just another side effect of the new bureaucracy. The nightmarish ones feel like the same bewilderment driven so far in on itself that if it's not actual madness, it could pass a Turing test for it. The introduction calls them "a very nervous collection of stories . . . a nervous man, writing in a nervous time." You catch their author in them as if in a trick mirror. The title story is autobiographical—if Bulgakov had gotten his start in fiction as a nebbishy loner who had previously only written an embarrassingly bad collective play, as opposed to a married former doctor with several productions (however ambivalently he later felt about them) to his name. He's not quite the terrified Dr. Bakaleinikov who opens "The Night of the Third" being thrown off a bridge into a snowdrift by a gang of Cossacks, but he was in Kiev in February 1919 when Petlyura's forces lost control of the city and he did desert from the Ukrainian Republican Army, which had mobilized him. Neither of his younger brothers died in the Civil War, but both had enlisted in the White Volunteer Army and gone missing in action; it was not until after "The Red Crown" was published that Bulgakov learned they were alive. And he never once seems to portray himself as successful, or at least not in any way a luftmentsh wouldn't recognize. I am beginning to wonder if The Master and Margarita will turn out to be the outlier in his oeuvre, that just happens to be the famous one.
no subject
The other two novels I mentioned to
The more I read of Bulgakov's work, the more impressed I am with John Hodges' Collaborators, because the relationship it bears to the historical end of Bulgakov's life is very like the relationship of these pieces I'm reading now to the details of his early life and career: a kind of nervy, fevery shadow-show of the facts, full of hectic details and cut time, never straightforwardly anything. The absurdism of the funnier stories never quite tips over into the fantastic (where it would be less unsettling), but hovers on the borderline where you can't tell if an office that relocates without telling its employees is a Kafkaesque joke, an early mental health warning, or just another side effect of the new bureaucracy. The nightmarish ones feel like the same bewilderment driven so far in on itself that if it's not actual madness, it could pass a Turing test for it. The introduction calls them "a very nervous collection of stories . . . a nervous man, writing in a nervous time." You catch their author in them as if in a trick mirror. The title story is autobiographical—if Bulgakov had gotten his start in fiction as a nebbishy loner who had previously only written an embarrassingly bad collective play, as opposed to a married former doctor with several productions (however ambivalently he later felt about them) to his name. He's not quite the terrified Dr. Bakaleinikov who opens "The Night of the Third" being thrown off a bridge into a snowdrift by a gang of Cossacks, but he was in Kiev in February 1919 when Petlyura's forces lost control of the city and he did desert from the Ukrainian Republican Army, which had mobilized him. Neither of his younger brothers died in the Civil War, but both had enlisted in the White Volunteer Army and gone missing in action; it was not until after "The Red Crown" was published that Bulgakov learned they were alive. And he never once seems to portray himself as successful, or at least not in any way a luftmentsh wouldn't recognize. I am beginning to wonder if The Master and Margarita will turn out to be the outlier in his oeuvre, that just happens to be the famous one.
(Well, and it's brilliant.)
I hope whoever wrote that is justifiably proud.
Oh, yeah.