The literary scenery in the Soviet Union

January 14, 2012

To start the year 2012 in style, we added today to the website a completely new chapter on the literary scenery in the Soviet Union.

In The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov refers dozens of times to other writers, both classics from the Golden Age of Russian Literature and his contemporaries like Mayakovsky and the duo Ilf and Petrov. These references we already discussed on the website, most of them in the section Annotations.

Click here for the section Annotations

In this part of the website we outline the landscape in which the authors from the time of Bulgakov had to try to survive.

This chapter is not intended to describe the Russian literature in detail. The number of major and influential Russian writers is just too big for this. But to understand The Master and Margarita, it may be useful to know to what Bulgakov refers when he writes about Massolit and Griboedov or when he gives explicit or hidden links to classical Russian writers of to his contemporaries. That is why you will find here, in a nutshell, a brief overview of Russian literature, from the time of the tsars until now. With a special page about Aleksandr Pushkin, because he is is often quoted in The Master and Margarita..

Anton Chekhov

Click here to read everything on the literary scenery in the Soviet Union



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