Bulgakov's Last Decade: The Writer as Hero (review)
We now have three major studies of Mikhail Bulgakov's life and work: by A. Colin Wright (1978), Ellendea Proffer (1984), and this book. Curtis has chosen a narrower focus than the earlier studies, but her goals remain unclear. In the preface, she says that her purpose is "to suggest the many ways in which [Bulgakov's] preoccupation with the fate of literature spilled over into his fiction and even came to dominate it during the 1930s." But in Chapter One, she lays out different aims: "to continue the work of previous scholars both in illuminating aspects of Bulgakov's biography, and also in offering a new interpretation of The Master and Margarita" and "to show how the majority of his other works of the same period are bound up with the central theme of The Master and Margarita, that of the creator and his art."