Дон Kuxom [Don Kikhot]: A Dramatic Adaptation by Bulgakov Mikhail Margarita Marinova Scott Pollard Don Quixote: A Dramatic Adaptation by Bulgakov Mikhail Margarita Marinova (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 160 Bulgakov, Mikhail. Дон Кихот [Don Kikhot]: A Dramatic Adaptation. Edited by Margarita Marinova and Scott Pollard. Texts and Translations, 29. The Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2014. xliv + 132 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Suggestions for further reading. $13.00: £11.95 (paperback). Bulgakov, Mikhail. Don Quixote: A Dramatic Adaptation. Translated by Margarita Marinova. Texts and Translations, 29. Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2014. lvii + 115 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Suggestions for further reading. Note on the translation. $13.00: £11.95 (paperback). Bulgakov completed the first draft of his adaptation of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote very rapidly, during a rare and very happy holiday in 1938. He had joined his wife Elena in the sleepy town of Lebedian´, Zamiatin’s home town, taking with him a copy of Cervantes in Spanish, dictionaries and a Russian translation. The play had been commissioned from him by the Vakhtangov Theatre in December 1937, as the most devastating year of the Terror drew to a close. Work on the play alternated that summer with the completion of the first full version of The Master and Margarita. Elena described his Don Kikhot as a historical play, alongside his biographical studies of Molière and Pushkin, in which he made use of the past in order to express his own attitude to the modern world. In other words, he took Cervantes’s comic masterpiece, and while celebrating its exuberant, farcical aspects, also invested it with accents which aligned it with his own current preoccupations. Not only is there a melancholic emphasis on the noble failure, the idealist who is frustrated from pursuing his aims by vulgar materialism, but this dreamer is a close relation to the artists in Bulgakov’s portrayals. In Bulgakov’s play Don Quixote eventually recognizes the real world again, and abandons the fantastical ideas he has cherished about Dulcinea and about his chivalric calling. Instead he prepares calmly for the onset of death, almost welcoming its embrace. Readers familiar with Bulgakov’s other male protagonists such as Khludov in Flight, Molière and the Master, will recognize this longing for oblivion and release from the cruelties of the world. The actor Nikolai Cherkasov commented in his memoirs that of all the interpretations of Don Quixote he had performed, Bulgakov’s was the most tragic. Margarita Marinova and Scott Pollard have presented Bulgakov’s work in a pair of volumes, the first containing the text in Russian, the second containing a new translation of the work into English by Marinova. They have drawn upon much of the available scholarship on Bulgakov, including the authoritative eight-volume Azbuka edition of Bulgakov’s works (2011–13). There the editor Viktor Losev proposes to readers a previously unpublished REVIEWS 161 version of the text, which he describes as the third draft of the work, swiftly completed in September 1938. However, Marinova and Pollard have made a choice of source for the Russian text which might seem surprising, using the old 1971 Prideaux Press version, based on the 1960s Soviet edition. Nevertheless — and despite their not going into much detail to account for it — their choice of version seems well justified. The earlier version favoured by Losev is indeed an authentic reflection of Bulgakov’s first polished draft. The later, December 1938 version has lost fifteen pages or so — but this does improve the momentum and tightness of the text, and the cuts seem to have been dictated largely by aesthetic considerations rather than political censorship. Elena herself commented to the theatre that Bulgakov would never have agreed to spoil his own text. The extensive ‘Introduction’ and ‘Notes’ appear in both volumes, slightly adapted in the latter case for an English-reading audience, and offer a history of approaches to Cervantes in Russia, an account of the writing and staging history of Bulgakov’s play and a helpful analysis of Bulgakov’s selective reinterpretation of the characters and themes in Cervantes, as well as a substantial bibliography. There are a few minor inaccuracies about Bulgakov’s biography. The English-language volume contains an additional ‘Note on the Translation’, in which Marinova offers interesting reflections on the specific freedoms...