The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (38 page)

Fadeev also became Elena’s close friend. In October 1941, when Germans were approaching Moscow and panic began, he put Elena and teenaged Sergei on a train to Tashkent with a group of evacuated writers. Describing her farewell to Fadeev, Elena wrote in her diary, “At home … Sasha. Supper with him at eleven thirty. White wine.”
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Before leaving for Tashkent, she deposited Bulgakov’s archive in the Lenin Library, taking with her only a cache of his manuscripts, including
The Master and Margarita
.

At forty-eight, still attractive and charismatic, Elena was never alone in the Tashkent writers’ community. Those who read
The Master and Margarita
associated her with Bulgakov’s enigmatic heroine. Akhmatova, also in Tashkent, called Elena “a sorceress” in a poem she dedicated to her. For Vladimira Uborevich, the daughter of the executed military commander, Elena’s home replaced her own, which she had lost when her parents perished. Her mother, Elena’s close friend, was shot in 1941 as the wife of “the enemy of the people.” The girl had a tragic life, being raised in an orphanage and abused, as were all children whose parents had been purged. Elena took Vladimira home while in Tashkent, but the authorities would not leave the girl alone. In 1944, upon reaching eighteen, Vladimira was sentenced to five years in the Gulag for being Uborevich’s daughter. In the 1960s, she would find Elena in Moscow and, at her advice, would begin to unburden herself of her horrific experiences by writing letters to her.

In Tashkent, Elena had extraordinary dreams or hallucinations about Bulgakov, which she recorded. It was her way of communicating with her husband beyond the grave: “His face feels warm, just as in life.… He subtly winks and smiles at me. Only the two of us know what that means—he will be coming back.”

Today I saw you in my dream. Your eyes, as always when you dictated to me, were enormous, blue, radiant, looking through me to something perceptible to you alone. They
were even bigger and brighter than in life.… I want to ask Misha all those things I did not ask in life. He is trying to make me laugh, recites funny poems. I want to remember them, to write them down.… I come up to him and tell him, “If you only knew how much I miss you.…” He looks at me … with tears of joy. He asks, “So then the other man … does not satisfy you?” He is pleased.

In June 1943, Elena returned to Moscow and was reunited with her sister and with Bulgakov’s archive. She wrote poet Vladimir Lugovskoy, with whom she had become intimate in Tashkent, “Now I am fully immersed in the past, spending hours over the notebooks, letters, picture albums.…”
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During the war, when publishing and staging Russian classics was encouraged as a way to boost the morale, the Arts Theater staged Bulgakov’s play about Pushkin. Upon returning to Moscow, Elena attended every performance. For the first time, finding herself almost without means, she worked in an artisan cooperative, making hats, and later in the Arts Theater museum. It was also for money that she wrote a play, with a co-author taking it to the Arts Theater. Although the theater apparently approved and held a reading, the play was never licensed for performance. In 1946, Elena wrote a script and signed a contract with a film studio, but, like her play, this work was not destined see light.
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Bulgakov’s name continued to inspire vigilance and closed opportunities for Elena as well.

Immediately after the war, Elena made six attempts to publish
The Master and Margarita
. In 1946, she passed a letter, through a seamstress who worked in a government parlor, to Stalin’s personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev. In a while, Poskrebyshev phoned to say that the reply would be positive and suggested the person she could approach in the State Publishing House. Elena was elated, but her hopes were dashed that summer with the start of an ideological campaign against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, a satirical writer.

In the early 1950s, she herself printed Bulgakov’s collected works on her typewriter and bound the volumes. Elena would give this
samizdat collection to people who could help publish Bulgakov. In 1954, the liberal writer Veniamin Kaverin, first to resurrect Bulgakov’s name, favorably mentioned him at a Writers’ Congress. The next day, Elena sent him a basket of flowers and a copy of Bulgakov’s samizdat collection.
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In 1955, Kaverin became instrumental in helping her publish a volume containing two of Bulgakov’s plays. Although it was mutilated by censors, Elena felt it would pave the way for other books. Sensing the advent of Bulgakov’s posthumous fame, she even bought a splendid journal to record the progress of his publication. In 1956, she documented in it the publication of Molière’s biography, which appeared more than two decades after it had been written, but in abridged form, like his plays. Elena agreed to the cuts just to get the book published. By then she had secured the support of the prominent writer Konstantin Simonov, editor-in-chief of the
Literary Gazette
and the head of the Writers’ Union. But even with the help of famous people, progress in the 1950s was slow, and it was only possible to make one publication at a time.

Bulgakov’s major play,
Flight
, made its way to audiences in 1957. A theater in Stalingrad was the first to stage it, and Elena, thrilled, planned to attend the premiere. Her trip was postponed when she slipped on the ice and broke her arm. That year, the play was also staged in Leningrad and Moscow to full houses. Interviewed by Moscow radio for airing abroad, Elena said that this work’s production held great emotional importance to her because
Flight
was the play Bulgakov valued most: “He loved it as a mother would love her child.”
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That year, she suffered personal tragedy when her older son Evgeny, who coincidentally also suffered from hypertension, died at thirty-five.

In the early 1960s, Elena again attempted to publish
The Master and Margarita
. She took the manuscript to poet Alexander Tvardovsky, editor in chief of
Novy Mir
, which published Solzhenitsyn’s novella
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
in 1962. Tvardovsky visited Elena at home, and she recorded his words in her diary: “He said he was stunned to realize the scale of Bulgakov’s talent. ‘His contemporary writers cannot measure up to him.’ He spoke at length
about his impressions from the novel, but ended by saying—‘I have to be honest with you, it’s now impossible to raise a question of its publication. I hope we will return to this when there will be a real opportunity.’”
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Their conversation took place during the Thaw, but Tvardovsky felt that times were not ripe to publish the novel, which the premier, Khrushchev, would clearly not understand or support.

After a two-decade struggle for publication, Elena wrote Bulgakov’s brother, Nikolai, in Paris that hers was Sisyphean toil. Many times, she was about to succeed with
The Master and Margarita
, when events interfered at the last moment, ruining her efforts. Yet nothing could shake her faith in Bulgakov’s genius: “I believe, I firmly believe, that the entire world will soon know his name.…” Achieving recognition for Bulgakov became her crusade, “the goal and the meaning of my life.”
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In the 1960s, journalists and Bulgakov’s biographers came to interview Elena, finding that she knew his texts by memory and was eager to talk about him for hours. She was an excellent storyteller, but instead of writing her own memoir, as she had wanted, she gave the material to others. She wrote Bulgakov’s family in Paris in 1962, “I am doing all I can to publicize his every line and unveil his extraordinary personality.… I had promised him many things before he died and I believe that I’ll fulfill all my promises.”
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Vladimir Lakshin, deputy editor of
Novy Mir
and Elena’s good acquaintance, describes her visit to the magazine. At her request, Lakshin phoned her to say it was an opportune moment to meet Tvardovsky. Thinking it would take her at least an hour to get to the magazine, Lakshin was surprised when she appeared within minutes. “Elena Sergeevna stood in the doorway, wearing a spring black coat, a hat with a fine veil; graceful, beautiful, smiling.… ‘How?!’ I yelled. ‘How did you get here.…?’ ‘On a broom,’ she replied, laughing.…”
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Dressed like Margarita, Elena was living her role as a witch while promoting Bulgakov’s work. “She was young and beautiful, her laughter was resonant and exciting. And the low, coarse notes of Margarita no one would fail to recognize.”
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But again it was impossible for the magazine to take it on: Khrushchev’s demise in the fall of 1964 ended the short Thaw. Now,
The Master and Margarita
could not appear in
Novy Mir:
censors held the magazine by the throat after it published Solzhenitsyn’s novella. When, in 1965,
Novy Mir
brought out Bulgakov’s politically less charged
Theatrical Novel
, Elena was seventy-two and still waiting to see Bulgakov’s major novel printed. Simonov, experienced and well connected to the Party, suggested taking the novel to an obscure journal,
Moscow
, where censors were not as watchful.

In winter 1966–67, with Simonov’s help,
The Master and Margarita
at last appeared, abridged and without the ancient chapters about Christ and Pilate, in the journal. When it was published, word spread quickly and subscriptions to the journal soared. In libraries, there were waiting lists to read it. Eager to keep a copy of the novel, readers ripped out the pages with
The Master and Margarita
from the journal and substituted them with trashy works of socialist realism. In 1967, as she was holding the journal with the novel, Elena told Lakshin that her greatest fear was to die before keeping her word to Bulgakov. Her dream came true when that same year the full text of
The Master and Margarita
was published by Harper & Row in New York and, the following year, was released in Paris in French translation. Bulgakov’s name was becoming known around the world.

In 1967, Elena published her translation of a biography by André Maurois,
Lélia, the Life of George Sand
. She had published her translations from the French before, but this would be her most successful book, which ran to several reprints. However, it was only Bulgakov’s success that interested her. By then, she had already achieved publication for his plays and his first novel,
The White Guard
. Bulgakov’s books and productions were becoming instantly popular; his quotations were repeated in every house. A writer of great versatility, an ingenious storyteller who was comfortable with almost every genre and style, Bulgakov became a champion for generations of Russian readers. Elena’s story of how she had preserved his archive and pursued publication became a powerful legend, adding to his reputation.

Bulgakov’s fame transformed Elena’s life: publishers were inviting her to France and Eastern Europe. In April 1967, she wrote Bulgakov’s family in Paris, “Misha is now recognized as a remarkable writer, he is translated in dozens of countries, in France, England, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland etc., etc.”
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But traveling abroad remained complicated: when applying for exit visas, she had to write elaborate explanations of her trip. In September 1967, when Nikolai Bulgakov’s widow, Ksenia, invited her to Paris, Elena explained to the authorities that the goal of her trip was to bring Bulgakov’s archive to their homeland. Nikolai Bulgakov, a renowned bacteriologist, had corresponded with his brother for decades, and so she had to sort these letters and other materials. In addition, she had to explain how many of her relatives lived abroad. Aside from Bulgakov’s family, there was also her own. Her brother Alexander Nurenberg had died, but his family was in Hamburg, Germany; her niece, Henrietta Book, lived in London; and there was also some family in Czechoslovakia, all those people whom both she and Bulgakov had been denied a chance to visit.
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Arriving in Paris after Bulgakov’s novel was published there, Elena received bunches of flowers from his fans. She walked through the streets that Bulgakov had longed to see and stood by the monument to Molière he had described in the biography. The monument disappointed her: the original appeared inferior to her husband’s imagination. She visited Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, places where Bulgakov’s novel had become wildly popular.

In July 1970, on a hot summer evening in Moscow, Lakshin drove Elena to see raw footage for the film
Flight
, the first work by Bulgakov to make it to the large screen. Elena had been involved in its production as a consultant and now finally saw this powerful film with prominent actors in major roles. The studio screening room was packed and the heat suffocating. The day after seeing Bulgakov’s major work, Elena died of a heart attack, at seventy-six. She was not to witness Bulgakov’s unmatched popularity in their country, an
avalanche of his publications and productions in the decades that followed, and the genuine public outpouring of love for him.

Her ashes were buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, in the same grave as Bulgakov’s, under a granite headstone. For some time after Bulgakov’s death, she had looked for a suitable monument to install on his grave and spotted a black porous stone lying in the cemetery’s debris. The stone-cutters told her that the rock, weighing several tons, came from Gogol’s grave and was called “Golgotha.” The symbolic stone recalling the place of Christ’s execution had been erected on Gogol’s grave at the Danilovsky Monastery. During an anti-religious campaign in 1931, when Gogol’s remains were moved to Novodevichy Cemetery, “Golgotha” with a cross atop it was discarded.
The Master and Margarita
describes the crucifixion on Mount Golgotha and makes references to Gogol, Bulgakov’s esteemed writer. Elena had found a fitting monument for Bulgakov, his creation, and for herself—and produced a memorable legend.

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