The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (33 page)

Shilovsky, a First World War veteran, was among few officers with a noble background in the Red Army. He was thirty-one, charismatic, educated, and talented; “a wonderful man,” according to Elena. Bulgakov describes him in
The Master and Margarita:
“Her husband was young, handsome, kind, honest.…”
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Highly regarded in the army, Shilovsky was invited to teach at the Military Academy in 1921. That year, with Elena expecting a child, the couple decided to marry; she, however, insisted on a church wedding. This presented a major obstacle, since the Bolsheviks were hostile to the Orthodox Church. Elena, who had divorced her first husband in a Soviet registry office, needed the permission of Patriarch Tikhon for a religious wedding.

In summer 1921, the couple secretly arrived at the patriarch’s residence, meeting in his reception room with none other than
the prominent proletarian writer Maxim Gorky. Having recently launched an international campaign for famine relief, Gorky was there to discuss issuing a joint international appeal.
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After the Civil War, with the economy in ruins, the Bolsheviks seized grain in many regions, resulting in unprecedented famine, afflicting over forty million people. That year, a large-scale relief operation began, in which America played a key role.
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Despite the patriarch’s willingness to participate in this relief, the Bolsheviks would accuse him of sabotage in 1922 and incarcerate him as a pretext for their imminent reprisals against the Church and the clergy. Compared to the problems the Church was facing, Elena’s and Shilovsky’s business was easy to solve: the patriarch heard it with a smile and gave Elena permission to remarry. Later that year, the couple’s first son, Evgeny, was born.

Shilovsky was a good husband, but their marriage was, perhaps, too blissful for Elena. Two years later she wrote her sister, who was on a foreign tour with the Moscow Arts Theater, that nothing interested her at home and that she felt like running away. Shilovsky worked long hours, the nanny looked after the baby, and she was left with unspent energies. She needed her own pursuits to satisfy her love of life, gaiety, and fascination with the artistic realm.

In 1926, the couple had a second son, named Sergei after Elena’s father. The family’s fortune grew: two years later, Shilovsky was promoted to Chief of Staff for the Moscow Military District under the brilliant young Commander-in-Chief Ieronim Uborevich. They received a new apartment in a former noble mansion with white columns, located on a quiet downtown street near the seventeenth-century Rzhevskaya Church of the Virgin Mother.
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Coming to see their recently renovated quarters, Elena chose the best apartment, intended for the Commander-in-Chief, and insisted on having it; Uborevich and his wife Nina, an actress, were won over by her persuasiveness and charisma. In winter 1929, Elena moved into her spacious apartment, adorned with fireplaces and round windows, with her family plus her sister, along with a maid and a German
governess. A few years later, she would walk away from this luxury without regret.

In February 1929, when Shilovsky was on a business trip, Elena met Bulgakov at a party of mutual acquaintances. Told that the famous Bulgakov would be there, she at once decided to go: she admired him as a writer, having read his imaginative novel
The White Guard
and his satirical tales, and watched
Days of the Turbins
. On February 28, Elena was sitting next to Bulgakov, who amused the guests with a fantastic tale he was improvising; she hung on to his every word: “Having realized he had such an appreciative listener, he let himself go and put on such a performance that people were moaning with laughter. He jumped free of the table, played the piano, sang, danced; in a word, put on quite a show. He had dark-blue eyes but when he was so animated they sparkled like diamonds.” Bulgakov was a master storyteller and talented actor who could create characters and act out their roles on the spot; he transformed the evening into a fiesta. Few friends were surprised that Bulgakov, whom some believed to be a flirt, became captivated by the attractive Elena. The next day, they went skiing together; the day after that, he invited her to a dress rehearsal, then to
Aida
at the Bolshoi, and afterwards to an actors’ club where he played a game of pool with Mayakovsky. “In a word, we met every day and, finally, I pleaded with him, saying that I won’t go anywhere, I want to get some sleep, so that he wouldn’t call me.…”

But Shilovsky still had not returned from his trip and Bulgakov phoned her at three in the morning, asking her to come out. He brought Elena to Patriarch’s Pond, the place where his characters in
The Master and Margarita
would encounter the Devil, and, pointing to a bench, said: “Here they saw him for the first time.” Preserving a mysterious air, Bulgakov took her to the apartment of a strange old man, where they had an elaborate meal by a fireplace.

We enter a dining room. The fireplace is burning and on the table—fish soup, caviar, appetizers, wine. We are having a lovely supper; everything is fascinating, cheerful.… We
stay until morning. As I sit on a carpet by the fireplace, the old man loses his head: “May I kiss you?”—“Yes,” I said, “kiss me on the cheek.” And he: “A witch! A witch! She bewitched me!”

That night, Elena also “bewitched” Bulgakov, who would use her as a model for his mystical heroine in
The Master and Margarita
. His prodigious imagination helped him escape the grave realities of his own life and career. A few weeks earlier, Stalin had called his new play,
Flight
, “an anti-Soviet phenomenon,” leaving Bulgakov’s career in shambles.
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Although Stalin had made his remark in a private letter to a Soviet dramatist,
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his opinion became widely known, with disastrous consequences.
Flight
was banned before its premiere and Bulgakov’s other plays dropped from the repertoire. Even
The Days of the Turbins
, inexplicably Stalin’s favorite—he saw the production fifteen times—was no longer performed.

Flight
was Bulgakov’s most accomplished play. Structured as a sequence of dreams, it portrays the exodus of the Russian intelligentsia and the White Army officers after the Revolution and their lives as refugees abroad. Stalin, who followed Bulgakov’s career with interest, remarked that he did not mind having
Flight
staged if the writer “were to add to the eight dreams one or two more” reflecting the triumph of the Bolsheviks.
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When advised to write a Communist play, Bulgakov replied he could not succeed writing about things he did not know.

Stalin’s negative evaluation of his play left Bulgakov unpublishable and unemployable. The author of a popular novel and four plays, he found himself without means of survival as theaters turned down his applications to work as an actor or even as a stagehand. Despite pressure, he refused to compromise his artistic talent and become subservient to the state.

Bulgakov was still married to Lyubov Belozerskaya, a former émigré who had returned to Soviet Russia in 1923. She became one of his sources for his play
Flight
, where he used her stories about Russian refugees in Constantinople and Paris. This play and
Bulgakov’s novel
The White Guard
were dedicated to Lyubov, who was then his muse and assistant.

Elena and Bulgakov kept their affair secret, and neither of them seriously considered divorce. When, in summer, Elena took a vacation with her family in the North Caucasus, Bulgakov wrote her frequently, and she destroyed his letters, in which he had sentimentally inserted red rose petals. He begged her to speed up her return to Moscow, for he had prepared a gift for her. When Elena returned, he gave her his new satirical piece, titled “To a Secret Friend.” It was a story of how he had left the medical profession to become a writer, and all the vicissitudes of his literary career; he addressed it to his most trusted friend, confidante, and new muse—Elena.

In the fall, still hoping to prevail over censorship, Bulgakov wrote a biographical play about Molière titled
Molière, The Cabal of Hypocrites
. He considered Molière the greatest comic dramatist and could also relate to the tragic circumstances of his career. Molière had been under attack for satirizing religious hypocrisy, and was harassed by religious zealots and the Catholic Church, which had condemned
Tartuffe
and banned
Dom Juan
. This evoked Bulgakov’s own harassment by Soviet critics and censors. Although the play told about the seventeenth-century dramatist, it sounded modern and the title was a veiled reference to Stalin’s regime.

While writing the play, Bulgakov had two enthusiastic assistants: his wife and Elena took his dictation in turns. Elena brought her Underwood to the Bulgakovs’ apartment and typed the play. She and Lyubov were on friendly terms, and so Elena would also visit the Bulgakovs with Shilovsky.

Upon completing
The Cabal of Hypocrites
in December, Bulgakov gave it to the Arts Theater. In March 1930, the Repertory Committee censors banned it for performance, another blow to Bulgakov who now viewed his situation as hopeless. Ever after, he would struggle with attacks of anxiety and fear. He was continually refused employment: “They would not hire him as a reporter or even as a printer,” Elena recalls. “In a word, there was only one way out—to end his life.” She watched Bulgakov burn the drafts for several of his works
and the novel about the Devil, the future
Master and Margarita
. In this despondent mood he felt his works had no future.

But later that month, having recovered from the trauma of
Flight’s
rejection, Bulgakov wrote a forceful letter to Stalin and members of his government, defending his right to free speech. He described the harassment campaign against him in the Soviet press and the banning of his plays, which had received high public acclaim. Even
The Turbins
, despite its popular success, was relentlessly attacked by official critics who abused him because of his topic, Russian intelligentsia; for this reason, of 301 reviews of this play, 298 were hostile.
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Being “condemned to lifelong silence in the USSR,” he was asking the government to allow him to leave “for freedom.” And if he were not allowed to emigrate, the government should secure his right to find work. At present, strangled financially, he was facing “destitution, the street and death.”
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Elena typed this letter and on March 28, despite strong objections from Shilovsky, helped Bulgakov deliver copies to Stalin, Molotov, and other prominent addressees.

The prompt response surpassed their expectations. Within a week, delegates from the Young Workers’ Theater were in Bulgakov’s apartment, asking him to accept a position as director. While they discussed the contract, Elena sat in a separate bedroom. Bulgakov kept running from his study to her room for advice, so Elena had to emerge from her hiding place, help finalize details, and type the contract.

Just a few weeks earlier, on April 14, the country was stunned with the news of Mayakovsky’s suicide. By taking his life, the revolutionary poet sent a powerful message to the regime, so in this context, Bulgakov’s letter had an even stronger impact on its most prominent reader. On April 18, Bulgakov received a phone call from Stalin himself. Elena was at her place that evening when Bulgakov rushed over to see her to report his conversation with Stalin. (It was then unprecedented: four years later, Stalin would phone Pasternak after becoming involved in Mandelstam’s fate.) Stalin spoke in his habitually punctuated style, referring to himself in the plural,
and Bulgakov perfectly replicated his Georgian accent and intonations: “We received your letter. We read it with the comrades. You will have a favorable reply.… Perhaps, you need permission to leave abroad. Are you so tired of us?” Bulgakov, caught off guard, retreated from his decision to emigrate, saying that a duty of a Russian writer was to live and work in his homeland. (He would regret these words many times in the years to come.) “You are right. I also think so,” Stalin replied. As for getting a job, he said that Bulgakov should send another application to the Arts Theater. “I think they will accept.” Concluding, Stalin proposed to meet Bulgakov and have a talk. Bulgakov enthusiastically accepted, but Stalin never made an appointment and, moreover, no longer showed an interest in Bulgakov’s fate.

Over the years, Bulgakov would ask Elena the same question, why did Stalin change his mind about the meeting? “And I would always reply the same: ‘What could he possibly discuss with you? He knew, after reading your letter, that you would not ask for money or an apartment; you would talk about freedom of speech, censorship, and the need for an artist to write about the issues that matter. And how could he respond to that?’” When, shortly after, Bulgakov went to the Arts Theater, he was immediately hired as assistant director. After being unemployable for so long, he was now juggling two jobs in addition to his writing.

In the summer of 1930, while touring the Crimea with the Young Workers’ Theater, Bulgakov sent telegrams to Elena asking her to join him. When she did not reply, he wrote his wife, asking after Elena’s health. For Lyubov, Bulgakov’s intimacy with Elena apparently was not a secret by then. But Elena’s husband only learned about the affair in February 1931. He demanded that she end all meetings and sever her communication with Bulgakov. When Elena promised this, Shilovsky met Bulgakov privately and, having lost his temper during their conversation, threatened him with a gun. “But you would not shoot an unarmed man?” Bulgakov quipped, adding that he was available for a duel.
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Elena kept her promise to Shilovsky, and when they stopped seeing each other, Bulgakov noted, on a page of
his published novel (it served as a diary), “The misfortune struck on 25.02.1931.” They did not meet again for eighteen months.

During this time, Bulgakov’s play
The Days of the Turbins
was brought back on stage. This happened after Stalin came to the Arts Theater to see another play and inquired about his favorite
The Turbins
. He was surprised it was no longer performed and had to be reminded of his own negative comment, three years earlier, about Bulgakov’s play
Flight
. Stalin wanted
The Turbins
back, and after his visit in January 1932, the theater received a phone call from the Party Central Committee requesting that it revive the production. Although sets had been dismantled long ago and actors were busy, the theater hastily staged the play. Told the news, Bulgakov was overwhelmed with conflicting emotions: there was “a flood of joy,” then anguish. Stalin could ban or permit his works on whim, so there was no certainty whatsoever. When actors came to congratulate him, they found Bulgakov in bed with cold compresses over his heart and head. Over the years, it turned out that
The Turbins
would remain the only play Bulgakov could rely on for steady income.