The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov ed. by Ellendea Proffer (review)

106 BOOK REVIEWS flippant to us but reflects what is a serious art form to the Chinese. Clearly, it is this aspect of "China On Stage" which she should have emphasized much more - what she saw, what she felt and understood. She saw a good deal that many in the West are anxious to hear about, and she conveys enthusiasm quite well. With the mass of Chinese politics, however, as with the Chinese language, she is not equipped to respond effectively. It would have been better had she provided greater detail concerning personal reactions in her final essay on "Do-It-Yourself Theatre," for example, and avoided the history of the Chinese theatre prior to 1966, which she most unevenly glosses over, or the commentary on the "Black revisionist line," which she doesn't understand and which means little to the average Western reader. WALTER J. MESERVE Indiana University THE EARLY PLAYS OF MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, edited by Ellendea Proffer, translated by Carl R. -Proffer and Ellendea Proffer. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1972. xvii & 418 pp. $10.00. It is becoming a truism that the greatest writers of the Soviet Union, those worthy of universal acclaim, are those whose works have been proscribed in their homeland. Mikhail Bulgakov, no less than Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is such a writer. However, in the West Bulgakov has been considered primarily a novelist and short-story writer, in spite of the fact that his first drama, The Days of the Turbins, an adaptation of his novel White Guard, first appeared in English in the 1930s and has been regularly included in collections of Soviet Russian plays. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Bulgakov has not achieved recognition abroad in the sphere in which lay his major interest, the theatre, not only as dramatist, but also as director, adapter and even actor. Of his total dramatic output, only three of his early plays appeared on the Soviet stage. The Days of the Turbins premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre on 5 October 1926 and Zoya's Apartment at the Vakhtangov Theatre some three weeks later on 28 October; both were banned in March 1929. The Crimson Island opened at the Kamerny .Theatre on 11 December 1928, but was banned after four performances. Furthermore, neither Zoya's Apartment nor The Crimson Island has been published in the U.S.S.R. Flight, the first of Bulgakov's plays to be banned, and A Cabal of Hypocrites are also included in the present collection. The proscription of Bulgakov's plays resulted not from the fact that he was antipathetic to the Soviet regime, for he certainly was not, but that he would not debase his art by conforming to the cliche-ridden plots, stereotyped characters and ideologically centred themes demanded by party critics. It is man, rather than ideology; human problems, rather than the problems of the state, which are of deepest concern to him. Hence his plays rise above the national into the realm of the universal. BOOK REVIEWS 107 This is especially true of Bulgakov's two plays relating to the civil war: the conventional and realistic The Days of the Turbins; and Flight, in which he makes effective use of the fade-in/fade-out techniques of cinema. In each drama the centre of interest is the effect on the various characters of the collapse of the world as they have known it. In The Days of the Turbins the destruction of the world of Alexei Turbin, his fellow officers and his family is in progress. Some, like Alexei, are destroyed with their world; others, such as his brother Nikolai, are crippled; sitU others, represented by Talberg, flee; but the majority, exemplified by Elena, Shervinsky and Myshlaevsky, will accept the new world, for it is the world of their homeland. Flight begins where The Days of the Turbins ends, with the collapse of the White offensive in the south, and follows a group of exiles into emigration to reveal the disintegration of their personalities through the degradation imposed on them by living useless, poverty-stricken and ever more corrupt existences beyond the borders of their country. Of the four main characters, three...