There are evenings when Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov shared a billiards cue and swapped lines as the balls rattled across green felt. Sergei Yermolinsky, a screenwriter who moved in their circles, recalls a crowd gathering around the table, drawn by the clash of two towering yet contrasting claims to genius.
Onlookers remembered Bulgakov as quiet, often disapproving of the more flamboyant Mayakovsky, whose passion for life and art clashed with Bulgakov’s measured skepticism. Mayakovsky’s reaction to the Moscow Art Theater’s staging of Turbine Days, drawn from Bulgakov’s White Guard, showed a volatile blend of pride and protest. He urged colleagues to disrupt the performances, and at times he took a seat in the audience only to rise and walk out, signaling a stand against what he saw as a misread of his contemporary’s work.
Yermolinsky documented how Mayakovsky would needle Bulgakov even during games, dropping phrases about Turbine Days as if the cue ball itself carried a challenge. Turbinchiki was a symbol of modernity, wealth, and a certain cynicism about social ambitions, and Mayakovsky made sure the joke landed with the force of a critique. He spoke of country houses, grand pools, and a future in which companionship with a writer could be both a joke and a provocation.
Bulgakov responded with a blend of humor and steel, suggesting that material comforts would be pursued with quiet resolve by a character who had already left the party, a nod to Ivan Prisypkin at the center of Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug. The exchange around Prisypkin underscored a shared literacy in political satire and a mutual awareness of the literary market and the life it funded.
Rivalry
The critic and observer Miron Petrovsky offered a succinct portrait of their relationship, noting likenesses that ran deeper than mere contemporaneity. He described a pair who stood as antipodes, mirror twins in many ways, sharing traits yet driving toward opposite visions of form and truth. The dynamic suggested a battle for the authority to define genre and artistic truth, a pressure that pushed both toward greater daring in their work.
Petrovsky argued that two creators only reach genuine dialogue when tension exists. If there is merely partnership, a common language forms easily, but true conversation arises from friction. Bulgakov and Mayakovsky, by this reading, possessed the prerequisites for a dialogue that could unfold with energy and risk, a conversation that tested boundaries and produced sharper, more provocative art.
Mayakovsky in the works of Bulgakov
As Mayakovsky proclaimed a new cadence of life in his poetry, Bulgakov used his fiction to lampoon the ranks of literary society. Within The Master and Margarita, the fictional MASSOLIT figures become targets for satire, and scholars have traced resonances to Mayakovsky’s relentless drive and public persona. Critics have suggested that Mayakovsky’s presence in Bulgakov’s fiction operates as a shadow, a lens through which the author examined ambition, pride, and the hunger for recognition. A character in Bulgakov’s world bears traits associated with Mayakovsky, described as a poet whose vitality was both crowded with energy and edged by insecurity, a ferocity masked by bravado.
The interconnectedness continues in Bulgakov’s depiction of a revolutionary mood. His verse and prose echo Mayakovsky’s devices while reframing them within a more satirical or ironic register. In some scenes, a sense of oblique rain and the figure of a bold yet vulnerable poet surface as metaphors that link Bulgakov’s storytelling to the aesthetics and anxieties of his counterpart.
In another line of reflection, the story of a canary in Mayakovsky’s garbage poem becomes a cultural symbol that Bulgakov revisits in his own way. The canary’s head turned away from greed mirrors a broader critique of bourgeois appetites, and Bulgakov’s characters respond to that critique with stubborn humor. The White Guard features a moment when a character holds a bird, and the exchange hints at a shared preoccupation with fragile humanity under pressure. In Bulgakov’s portrayal, Mayakovsky’s persistent voice meets a counterpoint that amplifies the complexity of revolutionary ideals and personal loyalties alike.
Similarly, Bulgakov’s portrayal of Ivan Rusakov, a hero in The White Guard, echoes a response to Mayakovsky’s experimental poetry. The parallel draws attention to how each writer played with form to question authority, society, and the costs of radical change.
Liberation
During the years 1974 to 1985, a critic engaged in a correspondence about Bulgakov’s circle and the pressures facing the literary world. In a letter from the second wife of Bulgakov, Lyubov, it is suggested that personal tensions surrounding Turbine Days intensified private hostilities. Yet the public record also reveals moments of strategic restraint. A pivotal episode occurred when Bulgakov, faced with a ban on a controversial play, addressed the authorities with a bold, pragmatic appeal. The aim was to secure a position within the Moscow Art Theater, or at least some formal recognition of his work. The writer articulated a clear sense of purpose: a productive future required official support or, at the very least, the chance to contribute through another capacity within the theatre arena.
In the wake of these tensions, the shock of Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930 reverberated through the literary world. The tragedy unsettled Bulgakov, who wrestled with the idea of his own mortality and the pressures of a public life spent in close proximity to revolutionary rhetoric. Eyewitness accounts describe Bulgakov’s expression at the funeral as a rare pause, a moment of collective sorrow that underscored the personal cost of political and artistic conflict. The memory of that event also intersected with later conversations about how best to collaborate with the state, discern legitimate artistic avenues, and sustain creative work under scrutiny. A note from Stalin to Bulgakov, encouraging him to seek a role at the Moscow Art Theater, adds another layer to this intricate historical tapestry, illustrating how political dynamics and artistic ambition informed one another in those years.