Mikhail Bulgakov's The Life of Monsieur de Molière is a fascinating portrait of the great French seventeenth-century satirist by one of the great Russian satirists of our own century. For Bulgakov, Molière was an alter ego whose destiny seemed to parallel his own.
As Bulgakov's translator, Mirra Ginsburg, informs us: There is much besides their craft that links these two men across the centuries. Both had a sharp satirical eye and an infinite capacity for capturing the absurd and the comic, the mean and the grotesque; both had to live and write under autocracies; both were fearless and uncompromising in speaking of what they saw, evoking storms with each new work, and shared what Bulgakov calls "the incurable disease of passion for the theater."
The life of Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, is a story of struggle and dedication, and Bulgakov tells it with warmth and compassion. Indeed, for all Bulgakov's careful attention to historical detail, his vivid recreation of seventeenth-century France makes The Life of Monsieur de Molière read more like a novel than a formal biography.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, Russian Empire (today Ukraine) in 1891. He studied and briefly practised medicine and, after indigent wanderings through revolutionary Russia and the Caucasus, he settled in Moscow in 1921.
His sympathetic portrayal of White characters in his stories, in the plays The Days of the Turbins (The White Guard), which enjoyed great success at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926, and Flight (1927), and his satirical treatment of the officials of the New Economic Plan, led to growing criticism, which became violent after the play The Purple Island.
His later works treat the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical characters, with plays such as Molière, staged in 1936, Don Quixote, staged in 1940, and Pushkin, staged in 1943. He also wrote a brilliant biography, highly original in form, of his literary hero, Molière, but The Master and Margarita, a fantasy novel about the devil and his henchmen set in modern Moscow, is generally considered his masterpiece.
Fame, at home and abroad, was not to come until a quarter of a century after his death in Moscow in 1940.
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