Bard College in Annandale-on-the-Hudson has a summer festival of music and theater. During the upcoming 2013 season they are planning to perform a dramatized version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”, a novel he wrote in the late nineteen thirties, one he never saw published. He died – surprisingly, of natural causes – in 1940; Stalin somehow missed his chance of killing him for his writings. The novel is a masterpiece, a tragicomic romp in the surreal world of the Moscow of the dark Stalinist days preceding the Second World War. Prior to this defining book on which he worked for the last decade of his life, Bulgakov wrote several works that danced on the edge of the permissible, the tolerated. His play “Moliere, or a Cabal of Hypocrites” (seen in a brilliant New York production at the Collonades Theater many years ago that used the title “Moliere in Spite of Himself”) portrays Moliere in the court of Louis XIV: the battle of the writer with the dictator as he goes from favorite court jester doing the bidding of the powers-that-be to finally rebelling and refusing to continue the charade. Whether it is Moliere vis-à-vis the King or Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Isaac Babel and countless others vis-à-vis Stalin, or Stephan Zweig, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth during Hitler’s reign, or, for that matter, our own days of the death threats, fatwas that writers face if they dare defy the orthodoxy of some regimes, the fate of such people varies from simply being unpublished, unperformed and silenced to being jailed, tortured and often killed. Certainly in the Stalinist gulag the number of writers who were deemed to have defied the system were legion.

I grew up in that system. There were the Party stalwarts among the writers, performers and administrators of the arts; everyone knew who they were and their work was perceived as tainted by their loyalty to the brutal dictatorship. There were the openly defiant artists who had no chance of being heard or seen: they disappeared into silence or worse very early on. Then there was a vast middle ground: the accommodators who walked the edge, carefully following the line between the permissible and the forbidden, using code words, double entendre, metaphor, humor: anything to test the line and see what they could get away with – and yet stay alive, unjailed – and published. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not. Many a walker on this tightrope fell off it, over some perceived overstepping of the line. This was sometimes inadvertent – but there were times when a tightrope walker decided to defy gravity intentionally. All this made the role of writers in that world immeasurably more important than it is in free societies: we all knew the game, waited for the next poems, the next novels to tell us where the perimeters of the permissible were at that moment. Revolutions could be caused by a group of writers who simultaneously decided to defy the limits.

“The Master and Margarita” was finally published 26 years after Bulgakov's death in Russia and was translated and published in other languages soon after. By then Stalin too had been dead for thirteen years.I read it shortly after it appeared and saw “Moliere in Spite of Himself” in New York some years after that. One wonders, had Bulgakov not died of illness in 1940, how far would he have pushed? Would he have ended up in Stalin’s death camps along with Solzhenitsyn and his ilk, to die there – or perhaps survive and see the collapse of Communism?

I look forward to seeing “The Master and Margarita” in its reincarnation as a play.