著者

秋月 準也

出版者

ロシア・東欧学会

雑誌

ロシア・東欧研究 (ISSN:13486497)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2017, no.46, pp.90-99, 2017 (Released:2019-02-01)

参考文献数

15

被引用文献数

1

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This paper examines Mikhail Bulgakov’s letter to the Soviet government, sent on March 28, 1930, and explores how Bulgakov expressed his purpose, or, rather, his creative creed as a playwright. Bulgakov’s self-orientation, as discerned from the letter, is also discussed. The three major audience members Bulgakov had in mind for this letter were Stalin, Kalinin, Maxim Gorky, which we can deduce from the fact that he had sent a nearly identical letter as a petition to these three in June 1929. The 1930 letter has two aspects: petitionary and artistic. First, Bulgakov protested the banning of his plays “The Days of the Turbins”, “Flight” and “The Crimson Island”, as well as the repeated refusal of his requests for a short trip abroad with his wife to escape a series of critical campaigns against his personality and his work. He asked the Soviet government to immediately grant his request of leaving with his wife, Lubov, or, failing that, to give him a job in the Moscow Art Theatre, to work under the guidance of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko either as an assistant director or an extra or even as a member of the stage crew. Additionally, Bulgakov flatly denied that he was trying to curry favor with the Soviet government by writing a letter full of falsehoods about his plays and thoughts. He declared that he would never create a communist drama or even try to do so, simply because he fully understood that such a drama from his pen would never be a success. He confessed that “The Crimson Island” was a satire of the Glavrepertkom, a Soviet censorship agency, and he called for freedom of the press and the playwright’s imagination in the Soviet Union. Bulgakov severely criticized the censorship system in effect in Soviet Union as a writer in the satiric tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, he defended the Russian intelligentsia and claimed that he had tried to portray the intelligentsia as the finest class of society in “The Days of the Turbins” and “Flight” following the tradition of Lev Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. This letter shows Bulgakov, sometimes directly and sometimes with indirect intent, putting on radical anti-communist plays under his own direction for an audience of the Soviet government, or rather Stalin alone, which obviously increased the risk to his life. This was, however, a bet that partially paid off: on April 18, 1930, Stalin personally telephoned Bulgakov and informed him that the Moscow Art Theatre would accept him onto their staff.