The Writings of Scriptor Adorans

Book in the spotlight: Notes of a Dead Man by Mikhail Bulgakov

In March of 1936, the hilariously named Soviet newspaper Pravda (Russian for “truth”) published a scathing review of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Molière. The review attacked the work for its supposedly flawed historicism and called into question its ideological soundness. Today the hit piece reads like a parody of Soviet indoctrination – in other words, a parody of itself – but in 1936 this was no laughing matter. Stalin’s purges were approaching their crescendo, making it a singularly bad time to be raked over the coals by the mouthpiece of the Soviet regime. In the case of Molière, repercussions were swift. The play was taken off after just seven performances at the Moscow Art Theater (MAT), and Bulgakov left the theater later that year, ending a relationship that had lasted more than a decade. It was then that Bulgakov began work on a roman à clef satirizing Moscow’s theater world. 

Originally called A Theatrical Novel, the text was subsequently rechristened as Notes of a Dead Man. Only a Russian literary genius could have written a work where the macabre is so effortlessly balanced by the comical. Sergei Maksudov is a solitary neurotic who lives in a garret with a cat he’s rescued from the streets. He works as a journalist for The Shipping Herald; naturally, he hates his day job (“To spend all of my life working at The Shipping Herald? You must be kidding!”) and dreams of a grander destiny wholly incommensurate with his gifts. One senses that Maksudov is the kind of man equally capable of bludgeoning an elderly moneylender with an axe and of rescuing a prostitute from the plight of her trade. He does neither; following an attack of neurasthenia one night, he defaults to the usual choice for the Russian intelligentsia and writes a novel. But the novel is panned by literary acquaintances and rejected by publishers, and the disillusioned Maksudov decides to commit suicide. He is saved at the last minute by a deus ex machina, only the deus in question is a publisher with Mephistophelean features who appears just as someone plays Gounod’s Faust below. The strange man promises to publish the novel on condition that the words “Apocalypse,” “archangels,” and “devil” are excised. Subtle, not.

The publisher turns out to be little more than a swindler and soon disappears, but Maksudov’s fortunes begin to change. Slipping into a state of mental twilight, Maksudov reworks the novel into a play, Black Snow. Meanwhile, in a serendipitous turn of events, his novel catches the attention of Moscow’s Independent Theater (read: MAT), and when the theater gets its hands on the play, Maksudov is promptly offered a contract. Plunging into the maelstrom of thespian life, he finds himself out of his depth. The theater is a hotbed of endless intrigues and squabbles, and the lives of its denizens are as much a play as the plays with which the theater regales its audiences. With help from an actor he befriends, a man named Bombardov, Maksudov learns that the theater is divided into two fiefdoms. The lord of the first is Aristarkh Platonovich, who seems to be forever traveling in India. The second is overseen by Ivan Vasil’evich, an eccentric hermit who shows up at the theater in a horse-drawn carriage, even though he owns an automobile. Black Snow lands in the second domain, and Maksudov makes a pilgrimage to Ivan Vasil’evich’s home to read his play. Although Bombardov has tried to prime him for a successful reading, Maksudov forgoes some of the advice and suffers a complete fiasco. In one of the novel’s many uproarious scenes, Ivan Vasil’evich tells Maksudov the text is quite good; he only needs to write it. 

The play appears to be dead on arrival, but the theater blows hot and cold. It does not want to stage the play yet inexplicably refuses to restore the play’s authorship rights to Maksudov. Finally, during a masterfully depicted bender, Bombardov reveals the real reason the play is in limbo. Maksudov made the cardinal mistake of making all of its characters young, leaving no roles to the theater’s aging stars. The actors have taken umbrage at being left out in the cold and vetoed the play. But, once again, fortune smiles at Maksudov. Just as he thinks all has been lost, he receives a letter summoning him to the theater; miraculously, his play will be staged after all. The first part of the novel comes to a conclusion, and the second one begins with rehearsals at the theater. It ends abruptly after only a few chapters, just as Maksudov is introduced to the nuts and bolts of Ivan Vasil’evich’s System. Increasingly consumed by the plot of another novel he wanted to write at the time (The Master and Margarita), Bulgakov had less and less time for his theatrical one. The project was eventually abandoned.

Although the work was never finished, we do know what happens to Maksudov. There is a foreword to the text, written by someone who appears to have been Maksudov’s only friend. The author does not introduce himself, but we can surmise it might be the man from whom Maksudov steals the gun he never uses to kill himself and who resurfaces several times in the text. Maksudov calls him a friend but never refers to him by name. The author explains that Maksudov did commit suicide after all, by jumping off a bridge. He bequeathed the notes that follow to said author, and the fictitious provenance of the text is thus properly established. While this kind of prefatory disassociation from the narrated text is an oft-tried literary trick, the foreword is curious. The anonymous author mentions that he is familiar with Moscow’s theater life and that Maksudov had nothing to do with it, remaining a journalist for The Shipping Herald. The reader is further informed that Maksudov suffered from melancholia and his notes are nothing more than a figment of a febrile imagination. Given that Notes of a Dead Man is a roman à clef, the foreword seems to be a playful this-is-a-work-of-fiction disclaimer meant to protect the author from accusations he is settling scores. In vain: a list at the end of my lavishly illustrated Russian edition of the text reveals the real-life names of those who appear in the novel. It is a veritable Who’s Who of Moscow’s theater world, with some literary heavyweights thrown in for good measure. Most of the names are unlikely to be familiar to modern readers, excepting Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko (in the novel, they are Ivan Vasil’evich and Aristarkh Platonovich, respectively). So much for the disclaimer.

Yet, the reader is constantly tempted to question the veracity of Maksudov’s account. There is a lot of mystification going on here. Bulgakov’s use of magic realism gives the work a patina of irreality and, unlike the author of the foreword, Maksudov is not a reliable narrator. The second chapter of Notes of a Dead Man is called “An Attack of Neurasthenia”; the sixth, “A Catastrophe.” The merry title of the third chapter is “My Suicide”; the only death that takes place is that of Maksudov’s cat – the animal goes on a hunger strike in a corner, driving Maksudov crazy with its meowing until it gives up the ghost. The rooms and enfilades of the Independent Theater are so tenebrous and fantastically decadent as to seem ethereal; the characters who populate them are overwrought and nervous (open the novel randomly, find a dialogue, and you’ll see that its characters never talk like normal people; they shout, whisper, exclaim, say things coldly or in “funereal” tones, etc.) – more gargoyles than individuals. A dreamlike quality pervades Maksudov’s world, and one wonders if the narrator didn’t imagine it all. The syntax and style of the notes seem to corroborate the foreword – Maksudov is a hack, and it is unclear how someone with his literary gifts could have written a text worthy of the discerning audiences of the Independent Theater. Can you trust such a narrator? Reflecting on the failure of his first novel and his inability to produce a second one, Maksudov writes:

Well then, since you’ve taken up your pen, sit down and write your second novel. You don’t have to go to parties. The problem is not parties; the problem is that I am decidedly uncertain of what my second novel should be about. What should I relate to humanity? That’s the trouble.

This reads wickedly funny in the original – no writer of merit will seriously ask himself what he is to relate to humanity, certainly not in a way so touchingly naive. In fact, Sergei Maksudov is a typical, almost caricatural Russian protagonist. He is told by another character that there’s something Dostoevskian about him. True enough; equally, Maksudov could have walked out of a Chekhov short story. Gogol would have recognized him too, as would have Fyodor Sologub and Sergei Dovlatov. If Notes of a Dead Man is a satire of MAT, Maksudov is an ironic but friendly wink at the hapless, ineffectual, gray little man of the Russian literary canon. He is to be taken with a healthy grain of salt.

The title of the novel also has a trace of mystery about it. Initially Bulgakov named the work A Theatrical Novel (Teatral’ny roman). There is a double entendre here: the Russian word roman means both “novel” and “love affair.” No love affair takes place in the novel, but then we have to remember that a young woman does catch Maksudov’s eye during a rehearsal at the very end and that the text was never finished. Bulgakov later inserted a second title – Notes of a Dead Man – underlining it twice for emphasis. The editors of the edition I own decided that this was conclusive proof of Bulgakov’s preference for the second title, but editorial practices vary. To further complicate things, the novel has also been translated into English under the title of Black Snow. As Black Snow is the name of Maksudov’s play, we end up with a play on a play and with Bulgakov’s novel firmly in the realm of metafiction. All of this is enough to bedevil the reader, but that’s just part of the Bulgakovian charm. While Notes of a Dead Man cannot compete with such masterpieces as The Master and Margarita and The White Guard, it is a fine specimen of Bulgakov’s oeuvre, and its incompleteness paradoxically adds to the appeal. Readers are given a unique opportunity to invent Maskudov’s tragicomic journey to the bridge from which he flings himself to his death. By leaving the novel unfinished, Bulgakov inadvertently (or not – Bulgakov was a fatalist, and the devil in The Master and Margarita unforgettably says that nothing in life happens inadvertently) made the reader a coauthor and accomplice in the creative process. In a world that promotes collaborative experiences, that seems strangely appropriate.