Bulgakov's A Young Doctor’s Notebook: Soviet-era stories

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A Young Doctor’s Notebook: John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe – two incarnations of the same character Photo: KINOPOISK.RU

By Alexandra Guzeva

9:29PM BST 06 Apr 2013

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Sky Arts’ TV version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Young Doctor’s Notebook surprised many, as he is better known for other works.

Like Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov was a doctor; he worked for a clinic in a village about 200 miles from Moscow. But in the early part of the 20th century, travelling to an emergency at night through snowdrifts by troika, it might as well have been 2,000 miles from the metropolis.

The script for the TV drama series, like the short-story collection, begins with a young, inexperienced doctor who goes to work in such a village. Immediately, he is called upon to extract teeth, supervise births and
treat syphilis.

Swapping wizard’s wand for doctor’s bag, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe masterfully depicts the panic of the main protagonist,
scurrying from the agonised patient back to his room to consult his medical textbooks.

Less well-known than The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov's magnum opus) and Heart of a Dog, A Young Doctor’s Notebook is not the only collection that draws heavily on Bulgakov’s life. Notes on the Cuff (1923) reflects on his literary journey, especially his experience of living on a writer’s salary in post-revolutionary chaos. In it, the main character, delirious with typhus, is surrounded by mysterious events.

It also pokes fun at the Soviet censors – Bulgakov had scores to settle with them. In a letter to the Russian writer and dramatist Maxim Gorky, Bulgakov wrote: “All my plays are banned; there is not a single line of
my prose printed anywhere.”

 
^{Sense and censored ability: Bulgakov was blacklisted}

Bulgakov considered A Theatrical Novel his best work. When an unhappy journalist decides to quit his boring job to write a novel, the guests he invites to his house promise him that his novel will be staged at a theatre, only to deceive him. Sadly, Bulgakov had experienced this situation personally, too.

Written in his characteristic note-like style and, again, autobiographical in nature, the narrator reads “Notes of the dead” supposedly given to the writer by someone about to commit suicide, with the request that nothing be edited or changed. Despite being written 10 years after Notes on the Cuff and A Young Doctor’s Notebook, the novel present a similar exploration of despair.

Joseph Stalin refused to approve Bulgakov’s play Days of the Turbins, a drama based on one of his earliest autobiographical works, the novelThe White Guard. Examining the toll the Revolution has taken on the
everyday life of the Turbin family, readers feel the tumult as the horrors
of civil war unfold, disrupting normal family life, during an especially
harsh winter in Kiev.

Blizzards are one of Bulgakov’s favorite motifs, and these storms make brutally effective appearances in The White Guard and A Young Doctor’s Notebook. For Bulgakov, snow both accompanies and generates chaos and confusion.

In fact, many of the trials that characterise his work – civil war, injustice, illness, despair – also characterised his life. What is truly moving is the sometimes funny, always terrifying, beauty he made of it all.

(Article from www.telegraph.co.uk)