The arguments of Sergey Shilovsky


On December 4, 2011, just before the premiere of the ballet The Master and Margarita would start in the Philharmonic Hall in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia), the spectators were informed to their surprise that they would be watching the ballet Movement for the truth. It appeared to be the same ballet, but with a different title.

The name change was the ballet's reply to a letter they got from Sergey Shilovsky, a grandson from a previous marriage of Elena Sergeevna, the third wife of Mikhail Bulgakov. Just before the premiere, he had sent a letter in which he wrote that, as an heir of Bulgakov, he had given no permission for this show and that he wanted it to be banned. Unless - you can guess the line of thinking - the Philharmony came up with a sufficient amount of money.

Shilovsky didn't care about the fact that the ballet is not retelling the plot of the novel. "Without my permission The Master and Margarita can not be staged by anyone," he said in a telephone interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda. "I have obligations to others who have bought the rights to the novel. I heard about the show in Krasnoyarsk only a few days before the premiere. We could gave negotiated, but negotation is a process, and there wasn't enough time. I had no other choice but prohibiting the performance."

It is not known how much money Shilovsky wanted for granting permission, but art director Olga Sergeevna said he was asking “an obscene amount”. So the ballet's management decided to apply some changes, and to delete the words The Master and Margarita from the title.



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