Dream Story (2 of 2) & Mikhail Bulgakov
Book-burning, pearl-fishing and orange-throwing
Dear classics reader,
On this week’s mortuary slab you will find:
Some background on Mikhail Bulgakov before we start reading The Master and Margarita next week;
Birthday wishes to Karen Blixen;
A preview of coming attractions and other notices;
And for paid subscribers:
The week’s new classics – including a sixteenth-century teenager’s diary;
And our final discussion of Dream Story – with a note on adaptations and alternative endings.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, please click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom – or visit Substack.
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)
I’m very much looking forward to reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s frightening, hilarious, satirical The Master and Margarita with you. We’re going to read it over five weeks, starting next Friday 24th April. All the details are here.
Beforehand, here is a little about Bulgakov’s life.
Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov was born in Kiev in May 1891, the son of an academic theologian. He grew up reading Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Dickens.
He trained as a doctor and volunteered for the Red Cross during the First World War, after which he worked as an army medic for the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic before it was subsumed into the Soviet Union.
In 1920, he gave up medicine in order to write and moved to Moscow the following year, where he made a living as a journalist, writing controversial plays and subversive novellas, including The White Guard (1925) and A Dog’s Heart (1925).
Stalin took a personal interest in Bulgakov, banning some of his plays but requesting special performances of others. In 1930 he appointed Bulgakov director of the Moscow Arts Theatre.
From 1929 onwards, the government censor repeatedly banned the publication of Bulgakov’s works and he spent the rest of his life writing his secret masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. At one point he burned the first draft – for fear of it being found – and later rewrote it from memory.
After Bulgakov’s death in 1940, his third wife, Elena – whom he called ‘Margarita’ – waited 26 years before she was able to publish a censored version in the magazine Moscow. The first uncensored edition in the USSR was published in 1973.
When Bulgakov died, Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem ‘In Memory of M.B.’, in which she said:
You died as unflinchingly as you lived,
With magnificent defiance.
I look forward to reading The Master and Margarita with you, starting next Friday.
Happy Birthday Karen Blixen
In other news, Karen Blixen was born on this day in 1885.
Karen Dinesen was born on her family’s estate of Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen. Her earliest stories were published under the pseudonym ‘Osceola’, the name of her father’s dog.
She studied art before marrying her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in Kenya in 1914 and managing a coffee plantation with him at the foot of the Ngong Hills in the Great Rift Valley. They separated in 1919, but Baroness Blixen continued to run the plantation for more than ten years – the subject of her elegiac memoir, Out of Africa – until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to return to Rungstedlund.
She lived there the rest of her life, writing books in English and translating them into Danish. She published many of them under the pen name Isak Dinesen. In 1959, she visited the USA, where she was feted by US celebrities, including John Steinbeck, e e cummings, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Today her homes in Denmark and Kenya are both museums.
Babette’s Feast and Other Stories by Isak Dinesen (1958)
These five rich, witty and magical stories include one of her most well known tales, ‘Babette’s Feast’, which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in ‘Tempests’, a mysterious pearl-fisher in ‘The Diver’ and a brief, tragic encounter in ‘The Ring’. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Blixen, and show her as a master of short fiction.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 256 pages
[US] Knopf Doubleday | 289 pages | as Anecdotes of Destiny
Coming Attractions and Other Notices
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, take a peak here. I’ve just added our October read-along to the list.
Catalogue
Yesterday, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Penguin Classics series this year, Penguin published a complete catalogue of every Penguin Classic title currently available in the UK. Catalogue is beautifully produced — and I’m proud to say that I helped to assemble the text inside.
Here is Penguin’s description:
From Achebe and Austen to Zola and Zweig, and from the Epic of Gilgamesh to twenty-first century dystopias and autofiction, here is the complete list of every Penguin Classic in print. Published in a beautiful clothbound format, the list is arranged alphabetically by author and also includes key bibliographic information such as sub-series, genre and ISBN. Comprising 3,500 entries, this is the essential reference guide to the world’s largest and best-loved classics list.
Annual book subscription
And if you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
