A Double Game with Stalin
Orlando FigesNew York Review of Books
Jan 12 2012
Lit Division RPL Central
review of Collaborators
a play by John Hodge
National Theatre London through June 2012
"Collaborators starts with the writer Mikhail Bulgakov waking from a nightmare in which he is being chased around his small apartment by Stalin. Tripped and lying on the floor, Bulgakov is about to be killed by the scary dictator, looming over him with a heavy typewriter and threatening to bring it crashing down onto his head, when he is awoken form this slapstick scene by his wife Yelena, who asks routinely, as if her husband dreams this every night, "Did he catch you?"...
John Hodge's play is a dark and grotesque comedy about the cat-and-mouse relationship between Stalin and the satirist Bulgakov, author of The White Guard, Stalin's favorite novel, who nonetheless remained a persecuted figure in the proletarian culture of the Soviet Union during the 1930s..." nyrb
New Bulgakov
Six Plays
Mikhail Bulgakov
Methuen, 1991
891.72 B933s