Lesley Milne - Böcker

When it was published this was the full, post-glasnost critical biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), a great comic writer whose works are regarded as modern classics. This account of Bulgakov's career as playwright and prose-writer examines all his works in the context of the changing demands put upon artists in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, who were faced with the choice of integrity at the price of silence, or publication and production at the price of conformty with the totalitarian state. Lesley Milne traces through Bulgakov's career an ethical concept of the writer's role, his response to his time, and his search for an audience in and beyond that time.

The end of the Cold War brought new opportunities to explore the long tradition and myriad uses of humour through over two centuries of Russian literature and culture. 'Reflective Laughter' is the first book devoted to an overview of this subject. Bringing together contributions from a number of distinguished scholars from Russia, Europe and North America, this volume ranges from the classics of nineteenth-century literature through to the intellectual and popular comedic culture, both state-sponsored and official, of the twentieth-century, taking in journalism, propaganda, scholarly discourse, jokes, films and television. In doing so, it explores how our understanding remains distorted by the polarization of the East and West during the Cold War.

First published in 1996. In his native Russia, Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) is one of the writers whose works are most frequently read and whose plays are most frequently staged. Since his publication of his works from 1960s onwards, he has emerged as a major European author. This collection contains twenty-one articles by scholars from eight different countries: Britain, Canada, Czech Republic, France, India, Russia, Ukraine and the USA. In a diverse range of contributions, the authors discuss Bulgakov against the literary and theatrical background of his own time and in the context of today’s polycentric, multicultural world.