Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov A Life in Letters and Diaries: Mikhail Bulgakov: a Life in Letters and Diaries

Playwright and novelist, this is is a chronicle of Bulgakov's life. Combining diaries with extracts from letters, this biography provides insight into the pressures of day-to-day existence for a man trying to make a career as a writer in Stalinist Russia. A volume of the renowned Russian author’s letters and diary entries: “an evocative chronicle of [his] life, beginning with the 1917 revolution” ( The Guardian , UK). Mikhail Bulgakov was one of the most important literary voices of Soviet Russia. Yet his books were banned in his own country and his greatest novel, The Master and Margarita , was only published more than twenty years after his death. In Manuscripts Don't Burn —the title, a line from his famous novel—J.A. E. Curtis presents a gripping and intimate chronicle of Bulgakov's life, drawn from his own personal writings. Among other documents, Curtis draws on a partial copy of one of Bulgakov’s diaries which was presumed lost until it was uncovered in the KGB’s archives. That diary and those of the author’s third wife record the nightmarish precariousness of life during the Stalinist purges. Also included are letters to Stalin, in which Bulgakov pleads to be allowed to emigrate; letters to his siblings; intimate notes to his second and third wives; and letters to and from other writers such as Gorky and Zamyatin. In Manuscripts Don't Burn the title a line from his famous novel, J.A. E. Curtis presents a gripping chronicle of Bulgakov's life, using as source material, among other documents, a partial copy of one of his diaries which was presumed lost and uncovered decades later in the KGB’s archives. That diary and those of his third wife record the nightmarish precariousness of life during the Stalinist purges. Also included are letters to Stalin, in which Bulgakov pleads to be allowed to emigrate; letters to his siblings; intimate notes to his second and third wives; and letters to and from other writers such as Gorky and Zamyatin.