Punishing a Dramacide

BLACK SNOW by Mikhail Bulgakov. 190 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

The moral of this mocking autobiographical burlesque--although not perhaps the one intended by the author--is that if making an enemy is unavoidable and the choice is between a writer and a psychopath, the prudent citizen will choose the psychopath. Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director whose method of acting became the Method, had the imprudence to anger Writer Mikhail Bulgakov. He got away with it until 27 years after his own death, and 25 years after Bulgakov's. For most of that period Bulgakov's work was banned in the Soviet Union and unknown to the rest of the world, and Stanislavsky's reputation was safe.

Now, the official engines of conscience and convenience have rehabilitated Bulgakov. Last year the Soviets printed his Faustian novel The Master and Margarita, a rowdy satire written three decades ago that treats the Devil and the literary world of Moscow in the 1930s with equal seriousness (TIME, Oct. 27). The book was a great success in Russia and in the U.S. In 1965, Soviet literary authorities printed Black Snow, another satirical novel from Bulgakov's trunk. This is the book that leaves the great Stanislavsky with sour cream on his face.

Self-Editing. A lesser and looser work than The Master and Margarita, it reports slyly the absurd difficulties of a young writer resembling Bulgakov. Maxudov, the hero, is a staff member for a journal called the Shipping Gazette, and he writes a novel for the same reason that prisoners make their ropes out of bedsheets. He reads it to his literary friends. Awful, they say. He steals a revolver and determines to edit himself. As he is gluing his nerve together, the editor of a magazine bursts in and offers to serialize the novel (which is called Black Snow). The magazine expires after the second installment. By now Maxudov is too disgusted for suicide.

An important repertory group, the In dependent Theater, decides to produce Maxudov's novel as a play. All goes well until the great director Ivan Vasilievich--an obvious takeoff on Stanislavsky--gets hold of the script. He is an autocratic dramacide whose ears reject all utterances not made by himself. He has a few suggestions for Maxudov's play: the hero must be stabbed, not shot; the sister must be rewritten as a mother, and so on. Maxudov refuses to make the changes and sadly returns to the Shipping Gazette.

Disastrous Production. It is all wonderfully funny, but did any of it actually happen? Well, Bulgakov in the early 1920s did work for the magazine of the Railwaymen's Union and did write a novel (The White Guard), the beginning of which was serialized in the last two issues of a dying literary journal. And Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater did stage a version of the novel in 1926. But the play, retitled The Days of the Turbins, was a success.

Apparently Bulgakov, unlike the fictional Maxudov, got on well with the theater people, including Stanislavsky. The trouble between the two men, according to the useful preface of Translator Michael Glenny, actually began in the 1930s when Bulgakov wrote a tragedy about the death of Moliere. Stanislavsky accepted the play but demanded extensive rewriting to soften what was an obvious attack on Soviet censorship. Four years of wrangling resulted in a disastrous production, and Bulgakov resigned from the theater group. Another four years of brooding before his death at 49, in 1940, produced Black Snow, a book that seems more farcical than bitter. Essentially unpolitical, it is a sourly funny battle report on the ancient war between writers and those who, as editors or directors, meddle with their work.

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