Experimental Blog #86

Comments on 2 plays, "Flight" and "Adam and Eve" by Mikhail Bulgakov

The play "Zoykina's Apartment" has been described as about the rather large number of people who had not supported the "Bolshevik" revolution in Russia, but had to live, somehow, with the results. While the play "Flight" is characterized as being about a much smaller number of people who also did not support the "Bolshevik" revolution, but who left Russia around 1920, or soon after. The small group of people in this play went south from as far north as Staint Petersburg to the Crimea, and then on to Constantinople. From there they perhaps went on to France, but a few eventually even returned to Russia.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote, and rewrote, "Flight" numerous times in response to political and other criticisms, over more than a ten year period. Although there seem to have been many readings and attempted rehearsals, only one of the eight scenes, or "dreams", was ever published in Bulgakov's lifetime. "Flight" was called anti-soviet by Joseph Stalin himself, and he approved, for the last time in 1937, that its performance was to be prohibited. It seems, however, that the play was performed for the first time in 1957, in Stalingrad, and possibly later.

E Y Yerikalova, the author of the notes to the second play, says that "Adam and Eve" was written in 1931; a time when the world seemed headed more and more toward war. Other Soviet authors, such as Aleksey Tolstoy, were writing about future war and other "catastrophes". During this time important Soviet scientists, historians, and economists, besides others, were being arrested and sometimes executed. Some people who went abroad decided not to return to the USSR.

In 1931 Mikhail Bulgakov made contracts with at least one theater and made at least one reading of "Adam and Eve". However, after a copy was sent to the Soviet government for the necessary approval, it never came back one way or the other. Bulgakov apparently did not push the matter, which is what he had previously done. "Adam and Eve" contains, among other things, critical and intertaining comments about communism in Russia, and it seems prophetic in various ways.

"Adam and Eve" was not published in the USSR until 1987, but an earlier shortened and somewhat defective version came out from the Paris, YMCA Press in 1971.