BLACK SNOW: Mikhail Bulgakov

Actor Ed Stoppard on the book he turns to when he feels like he’s chasing his tail.

I first read the novel Black Snow (1966–7) in Moscow, which was probably the best place to do so. The book involves the reflections of Sergei Leontievich Maxudov, a young proofreader, who is moved to write a novel after experiencing a vivid nightmare. The work is deemed a failure by all who read it, but he is ultimately inspired to adapt it into a play. Remarkably, that play is taken on by the renowned Independent Theatre, where Maxudov is tortured both by the gang of fools and fakes that populate it, and by the intractable production process itself.

Bulgakov worked from 1925 to 1936 with the Moscow Art Theatre, run by Konstantin Stanislavski. The characters inhabiting the Independent naturally reflect the great director and those around him. And when I say reflect, I mean satirise, mercilessly. By 1932 Bulgakov had fallen foul of the authorities. His riposte was the play about Molière, The Cabal of Hypocrites (1936), a swipe at his treatment by Stalin’s censor and, after a draining four-year rehearsal period and Stanislavski’s capitulation to the censor’s demands, it opened to scathing reviews and closed seven performances later.

Out of this misery was born Black Snow, and Bulgakov’s frustrations and ire pour on to its pages. But such was the nature of the novel, combined with Bulgakov’s premature death in 1940, that it was only published in incomplete form in Moskva in 1966–7, finally appearing in full in 1973.

Mikhail Bulgakov, c.1920s

There is a heightened quality about Black Snow ; something unreal, if not surreal. At one point the hero finds, during a dinner, that he has stepped on a fallen piece of poached salmon: no explanation, no examination, just the simple observation and onwards. It is possibly because Bulgakov’s descriptions of characters and settings are so detailed and idiosyncratic, that they seem slightly removed from the real world. In any case they end up being very funny. Laugh out loud, curiously, shockingly funny. Chapter 3 is simply entitled ‘I Commit Suicide’ .

The word Chekhovian could readily apply to his writing. That writer’s work is full of people you can’t quite believe exist. It’s a sleight of hand: they are absolutely recognisable as members of the human race, yet you cannot recall ever meeting anyone quite like them. So it is with Bulgakov. His characters are memorable purely because they inhabit the fringes of human behaviour. They are grotesques: the tantrum-throwing actress, the zen-like House Manager, the backstabbing, bitchy musical director. Politics reigns at the Independent. To Maxudov’s anguish, the sexagenarian leading man and lady of the company are cast as the young lovers. Hell, the director of the theatre can’t even get his name right.

I can’t imagine why all this should so delight an actor, let alone one stuck in a sweltering Moscow for two months. Like Maxudov I was an outsider, and found it an alienating city that exuded an oppressive brutality. I was lucky enough to be pampered by a film company, but even so I was struck by a sense that the new capitalism had produced a no less ruthless system than had Communism. Maxudov’s struggles, then, offered me both insight and humorous relief. Reverent visits to Bulgakov’s apartment and the Moscow Art Theatre, which also produced much of Chekhov’s work, only added to my enjoyment.

I think there is some quintessentially Anglo-Russian quality in Black Snow’s blend of heroic failure, exquisite characters and sardonic hilarity that continues to charm me. I find it very comforting in some way. To misquote Kipling, it is a book that helps me keep my head when the world is making me lose it, for the simple reason that, however discouraging my situation, Maxudov’s is certainly more so. Maybe that’s a Slavic thing, or a Jewish thing. Or maybe the book simply makes me laugh.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow (1966–7), 2010 edition.