Acquaintance with the book of Chayanov allowed Bulgakov to find a topic for the book, which became the pinnacle of his work

MOSCOW. Bulgakov was inspired by the small book of the repressed economist Alexander Chayanov to create the “Master and Margarita”.

"The Master and Margarita" remains the most popular and published work of Bulgakov for decades. The serious illness and sudden death of the writer prevented him from publishing the book on his own. After the burning of the first version of the novel, which Bulgakov, for various reasons, considered “impassable,” there was catastrophically little time to create a new one.

Elena Sergeyevna Bulgakova, repeating the feat of Nadezhda Mandelstam, saved her husband’s manuscript, which was published in a magazine version 26 years later. In 1966, one could only dream of million circulations.

In 1922, Mikhail Afanasevich received as a gift a small book, familiarity with which was the impetus for creating a great novel. It turned out to be a story, the main character of which, a student Bulgakov, enters into a confrontation with a Satanist who received from his like-minded people in London as a win on the soul cards of some Moscow residents. Among them was the student himself and his beloved.

The author of the book was a well-known economist, anthropologist, writer, professor of the agricultural academy, a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat of Economics Alexander Chayanov. In 1930, he was arrested in a case fabricated by the authorities. A short stay in the wild, a new arrest, prison, exile, execution in October 1937. From this moment all Chayanov’s books were outlawed, banned, removed from libraries, destroyed. Some of the works managed to avoid death through the use of pseudonyms. One of them is Ivan Kremnev.

Chayanov’s legacy includes scientific works, works of art, works on Moscow studies. Despite the huge interest in the heritage of the repressed scientist and writer from Western scholars, it turned out to be impossible to obtain information from Soviet sources. The wording was standard and unconvincing: Chayanov’s books do not appear in library collections.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru