This is as close as I can get to the document given changes in writing platforms since its conception.

Original publication and copyright information as follows:

Baum, Rob. “Mad Messiah: Censorship and Salvation in Bulgakov’s Flight.” Themes in Drama Series.
Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992. 137-149.

Good men...sensuall men thought mad, because they would not be partakers, or
practisers of their madnesse. But they, placed high on the top of all vertue, look'd
downe on the Stage of the world, and contemned the Play of Fortune. For though the
most be players, some must be Spectators. --Ben Jonson

When "Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks," she walked out
of a small town and onto the world's stage. What madness it must have seemed, to neglect her
quiet role for disquieting fame, to thus cut down the fourth wall of propriety.
No longer a medical designation, madness has more to do with proscription than
prescription; thus, prisons and asylums interchangeably protect actor from spectator. Moralityi
constitutes one of the earliest and complex lessons imparted, and for the social majority, a
behavioural governor or censor is unconsciously internalized to uphold encoded norms.
Without them, "when the job was neatly done," we might all give our fathers fourty-one.
Madness grants license, a method of acting without regard to audience expectations.
Censorship pervades mental activity, as Freud explored through dreams:
The dream work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more
forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely
different from it qualitatively and for that reason not immediately
comparable...Little attention is paid to the logical relations between the
thoughts...(they) have to be reproduced exclusively or predominantly in
the material of visual and acoustic memory traces, and this necessity
imposes upon the dream work considerations of representability... the
dream has above all to evade censorship. (Freud, 1961, v. 507)ii
Seeking flight
Poetry is the dream of man waking, and dreams the poetry of man sleeping.
--Mazzoni
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was painfully awake to the ramifications of dream,
difference and censorship. His stories of Russian enchantments, politics filigreed with fantasy,
voiced sentiments inappropriate to the building of a Marxist nation. The governmental
censorship which plagued his writing was to become its ironic focus, his dream of free
expression a nightmare.
Flight (Beg),iii Bulgakov's dream play about the impossibility of escape from Mother
Russia, captures the ambience of dream in a vertiginous fast-forward of dissolving frames.
The playwright creates a performable experience of reality, dramatizing Gasset's idea del
teatro: illusion and anti-illusion converge, "the stage and the actor (are) the universal
metaphor incarnate," and the theatre "visible metaphor." (Cope, 1973: 218)
Compressing absurdity, fantasy, verbal and imagistic poetry, Bulgakov punctuates with
reflexive commentary, signing the correspondence between theatre and dream. The Russian
allegory teems with figures self-consciously trapped behind the curtain. Character Golubkov
states: "How strange it all is, really! Do you know, at times, it seems to me I'm
dreaming!...and the farther we go, the more incomprehensible it all becomes..." (Bulgakov,

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1969: 6)iv Heroine Serafima cries, "We are running from Petersburg, running and
running...Where? To safety under Khludov's (another character) wing! All you hear is
Khludov and Khludov...You even dream about Khludov!" (30), while Khludov muses,
"Nobody loves us, nobody. All our tragedies come from that, just like in the theatre." (21) In
the tantalizingly brief introductory scene, Archbishop Afrikans--disguised as the chemist
Makhrov--says of General Charnota--disguised as the pregnant Barabanchikova: "Mysterious,
a most mysterious character!" (7) And last, ironically, "What sort of comedy is this?" (50)
What sort is it? A tragic sort, in which the audience unwillingly, nauseatingly,
identifies with a man called "vermin," "insect" and "hyena." One in which an extended
childhood memory of cockroaches becomes metaphor and metonymy for exodus and desertion,
repeated throughout the play and its Russian title.v One where buyers exist for every body and
survival is paramount. Where bestiality thrives, the general populace resembles "civilian lice"
and a latterday "Noah's Ark" reveals humanity's destiny to infest the new world.
Categorical single-mindedness marks better-known dream plays: one narrator frames
the journey, standing between the intelligence of writer and audience. In Flight, complex
machinery hums, spiral gears of discrete minds. The audience must assemble conflicting
images delivered at dark and violent speed. Help is unavailable. No ironic doorman hovers,
eager to slam the gate. On the contrary, evil can crash the gate--and does.
Mad Messiah
Men's bodies tired with the business of the day betaking themselves to their best repose,
their never-sleeping souls laboured in uncouth dreams and visions, (and) suddenly
appeared to me the tragic muse. --Thomas Heywood
Flight’s central motif resides in Roman Valerianovich Khludov's sins against his
countrymen at the Crimean. It is the time of the White Terror (1920-21), when Russian
soldiers, peasants and workers fought over the interests of Entente capital. Fleeing before the
ravages of the advancing Bolsheviks (Reds), a group of "former people"vi bands, sharing only
the dubious bond of White sympathizing.
His superiors escape, but General Khludov persists at the Front, a White devil of
principle ordering the hangings of alleged Bolsheviks from lampposts. His mission to secure
Russia from revolutionaries becomes a horror of commission: they dangle like game in dark
bags
In Bulgakov's earlier feuilleton Red Crown (Historia morbi, 1922), the narrator is
haunted by the images of his dead brother Kolya and a man hanged by Kolya's superior, a
White general. Responsibility for the barbarism lies with both general and narrator, a guilty
connection: "Who knows, perhaps that dirty begrimed man from the lamppost in Berdyansk
comes to you. If so, we suffer justly. I sent Kolya to help you hang others, and you did the
hanging." Under the intolerable burden, the narrator goes mad.
In the general madness, General Khludov's acts evade censorship. The small light
which the orderly Krapilin is commanded to shed upon the First Dream becomes fatal
illumination in the dream following, when he denounces his superior:
...you can't win the war with rope alone! Why did you butcher the
soldiers at Perekop, beast? But one human being (Serafima) did come
your way, a woman. She took pity on the strangled ones, that's all.
But nobody can get past you, nobody! Right away you grab him, and
into a bag! Do you feed on carrion?
Finding a "glimmering of sound sense about the war in his words," Khludov urges him
to continue, asking his name. Krapilin raves,

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 ...A name, what's the difference? It's a name nobody knows--Krapilin, an
orderly!vii But you will perish, jackal, you'll perish, wild beast, in a
ditch!...You're only brave to hang women and locksmiths!...All the
provinces spit on your music!
Khludov listens with respect. Krapilin does not condemn himself until the moment he
drops fearfully to his knees and recants. Khludov cries,
No! You're a poor soldier! You began well, but the end was rotten.
Groveling at my feet! Hang him! I can't bear the sight of him!
At which, according to stage directions, "The counter-intelligence men instantly throw a black
bag over Krapilin's head and drag him outside."(32-3)
Thereafter, Khludov is haunted by the silent, invisible Krapilin, to whom he defers:
"...I'm not much of a talker. Krapilin, you're the eloquent one..."(Bulgakov, 16) In one of
many arresting images, Khludov nervously opens the door beyond his office to confront a
"series of dark, abandoned rooms with chandeliers wrapped in dark muslin bags," mute
witness. Surely this is the artist dreaming himself, waking at the end of each scene to fearful
darkness.viii Khludov "murders sleep."
Soviet audiences would have recognized the character of Khludov as the real and
sensational General Slashchov, a brilliant 34-year old strategist awarded the honorific
"Krymsky" for his defense of the Crimea in 1920. He was often unreliable, a drug addict and
alcoholic noted for brutality; he himself "admits that there was a general feeling (I) was
suffering from upset nerves if not actual madness." (Wright, 1978: 124-5)ix Following
"summary execution of a Colonel Protopopov" (upon whom Krapilin is probably based),
Slashchov complained of attempts at discrediting his distinguished career.
Khludov surfaces in the Second and only three successive Dreams. But he is always
present beyond the curtain, a grotesque mirror in the dressing room. The dislocation and
impotence of the schizoid is revealed through the postmodernist fragmentary world, amid a
carnival of lurid sights, sounds, smells, diseases and foul temptations. This is Khludov's
dream, and we dream it with danger: "tripping" through the hyper-space of derangement, we
may be caught. As Serafima tells her torturer,
"Now I'm like you, I cannot sleep...The Cossacks were allowed to go
home. I'll ask to go, too, I'll go back with them, to Petersburg. It was
madness. Why did I ever leave?...There is one thing...that keeps me here--
what will become of you? (Bulgakov, 90-1)
For many, Khludov is the curtain.
With military jurisdiction over the "glorious army of Christ" as well as power to dole out
misery, redemption, charity and murder, Khludov is one with Russia, the "kingdom divided
against itself"x to which Archbishop Afrikans obliquely refers. His messianism is corrupt, the
charge to lay his body between the Reds and his nation’s leadership a patriotic but futile
sacrifice. The gods have fled.
Khludov's crazy dream to evade censorship (Freud's injunction) can only lead to trial
and execution--and simultaneous rebirth in the Motherland. The matrix of the future is
Russia's spiritual revolution, a condition without need for censorship or madness.
Neurosis...is presented as a literary analogue of a sociopolitical malaise
afflicting a given society in general and certain segments of that society in
particular...The "madness" of a certain social order or ideology...is
transformed into the psychological disorder of a literary protagonist who,

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 through his own words and example, then shows that order or that ideology to
be flawed or "mad" in some degree...(Riggan, 1986:128)
As in Strindberg's early chamber playTo Damascus, the struggle remains internal and
solitary, hidden in an iconographic landscape. The flight of the Whites wings them from the
monastery to the Crimean, from Constantinople to a Parisian flat, and back to Rome--Stations
of the Cross which Khludov shoulders, reflected in the Sevastopol lampposts strung with the
black bags of his victims (their "crimes," printed on signboards, form the crosses' arms, while
the full, hanging bags are testaments).xi
But Khludov's odyssey is a spiritual violation. In the madness of war Russian
Orthodoxy has gone underground: having "tied up the bells' tongues," the monks' choir sings
by candlelight in the recesses below the beleagured monastery. In burying the ancient divine,
the godhead of Bolshevism unearthed a deep spiritual hunger.xii
Former People
How is it that you alone have separated yourself from the long chain of moons and
lampposts? --Khludov to Krapilin
Khludov can neither escape nor embrace his action: by the Fourth Dream he is waking.
Reproaching the Commander in Chief for pending desertion, Khludov shares an agonizing
moment of self-recognition:
Do you have any idea of the hate a man must feel when he knows that nothing
will come of his actions, and yet must act? It is because of you that I am sick!
However, this is not the time, we are both passing into non-being. (46)
Nothing, Descartes tells us, can be more false than dreams. Internal concepts of good
and evil survive externally; truth exists, like the individual, independent of discourse.
If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You
must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must
never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be
given a name. From now onwards (you) must not only think right; (you)
must feel right, dream right. (Orwell, 1961: 231)
Khludov personifies the primary life and death struggle of humanity, but flounders in the
initial level of self-consciousness. His exclusive acts accelerate to the critical matchpoint of self-
negation without essential differentiation.
The "dialectic" (Hegelian) is one of a blocked contradiction--an irresolvable
conflict between unrelated opposites--and a resulting rise of consciousness to
break the deadlock and smash the object-state in which the subject has been
confined. (Lawler, 1976: 197)
To Soviet censors, the dream universe was all too Russian and Khludov a dangerously
unfunny joke: the hygienically deconstructing man, a concatenation of falsehoods. The actor
playing Khludov--a dreamed murderer, hence, unmade-man--becomes a truly monstrous
Platonic mimesis--an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction--in short, the perfectly
Marxist "modern man."
In the dehistoricizing movement spawned by the Counter/ Revolution, class segregation
gives way to group oppression and Russian proletariats take the place of Sartre's "natives." As
a result, "the humanity of the native is alienated into a state of quasi-animality. Since animality
and humanity are antimonies, the contradiction will inevitably explode, and the native will
regain his humanity. He must first smash the state of inhumanity in which he has been
imprisoned." (Lawler, 220) This "new man," writes Sartre, begins his life at the end of it.

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 What matter the victims, if thereby the individual affirms himself?...What matter the
death of vague human beings, provided the gesture is beautiful? --
Laurent Tailhade
Sartre's theories on violence recognize Marxism as a new form of Russian colonialism,
a collective human philosophy which collectively dehumanizes. (Reds and Whites use like
measures.) Bolsheviks will overthrow the feudal system to enforce modern utopian
homogeneity. Khludov resists not because of the ideals the Bolsheviks espouse, not even
because he is an aristocrat, but because he is a soldier. It is his duty.
Soiled Suit
The making of one's life into art is after all the first duty and privilege of every man.
--Arthur Symons
Bulgakov wrote Flight without the restrictions imposed upon his previous play Days of
the Turbins, (Dni Turbinykh), then playing at Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). (Turbins deals
with the events of the Counter/ Revolution, 1916-18.)xiii Under Stanislavski's direction,
revisions for the more conventional, realisticTurbins were formal and reductive: a dream
sequence was cut, geography limited, scenes reduced, and an un-Bulgakovian ending imposed
(in which actors listen quietly to a parade band playing the "International").
The dream within a dream fully exemplifies Bulgakov's intensive grasp of dramatic
structure, his ability to nest ideas like Russian eggs--
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
--Shakespeare (Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i, 4-17)
--while the tendency to introduce or "disrupt" his fictions and plays with autobiographical
detailxiv is typical of a previous era.
Employing epigrammatic techniques, sandwiching social comment between sides
of verse, poets such as Ben Jonson impaled the contemporary world--author, audience,
friends and critics--in an politically acceptable manner. But blatant politicizing of the
present became foolhardy under Stalin's regime. Banning the play before its premiere,
Stalin wrote:
Flight is a manifestation of an attempt to elicit pity, if not liking, for
certain levels of anti-Soviet émigré society--therefore an attempt to justify
or half-justify the White Guard movement. Flight, as it stands, is an anti-
Soviet phenomenon. (Proffer, 1972: 162)xv
Despite the play's February 1929 banning, MKhAT avidly pursued staging of Flight;
not until 1934 was Stanislavski convinced that it would not receive permission for production.xvi
After Stalin's letter, three other Bulgakov plays were prompty dropped from repertory
throughout the country, including Days of the Turbins --which had already had 250
performances since its opening in 1926. Virtually every work written by Bulgakov after 1929
met with hostility if not rejection. The playwright was unofficially branded with the title
"satirist," an "unthinkable" genre in the Soviet Union. He took to wearing slippers and pajamas,
adopting this old-fashioned (madman's) appearance as a protest: "There, you wanted to see me
like this...so there, here you are...that's how I am."xvii It was a stab at Hamlet by an artist sinking
into inaction, destructive self-obsession and censorship. Critic R. Pikel exulted:
His talent is as obvious as is the socially reactionary nature of his
works...The withdrawal of Bulgakov's plays signifies a thematic sanitary
cleansing of the repertory.xviii

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 As his plays disappeared from libraries, Bulgakov developed insomnia and a nervous
tick. Yermolinsky writes of his friend:
He was convinced of the necessity of pitilessly satirical depictions of
life. This was not just the play of a mocking mind, but the author's
civic stance. (Yermolinsky, 1982)
Bulgakov wrote to Stalin several times asking to be allowed to emigrate, identifying his desire
to be a "modern writer" with Gogol's inability to remain in Russia for any length of time.xix
Fortunately for Bulgakov, Stalin merely ignored the request.
He climbed still further out the limb in 1929, beginning work on The Cabal of
Hypocrites Moliére (Kabala svyatosh Mol'yer), a play which exposes bureaucratic censorship
of the writer Moliere.xx The same theme, stripped of biographical metaphor, appears in The
Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita), written secretly from 1928-40. But there is a
more insidious censor than government, as Bulgakov knew. Ashamed by the quality of his
new play, the barely fictionalized playwright Master discovers:
...People are right when they say you can't destroy something once you've
written it. You can tear it up or burn it...or conceal it from people. But
from yourself, never! That's it! It's irrevocable!xxi
To the artist, censorship is akin to murder.xxii
At the heart of Bulgakov's genuis beats an ability to dematerialize theatre. He implies
dreamy fantasy but implements nightmarish reality, expounded with grim economy. His
protagonists live in shadow. But he shines forth a fatal light.
Khludov's bagged victims signify his own hood-winking. With his maker, he is the
näive soul of Russia, her madness and salvation, a kingdom divided. He--and She--have lost
spiritual compass; dream and life are indissolubly fused, a treacherous coastline uncensored
even by darkness. Unable to pilot Russia, to plot the Promised Land, Khludov is a false
messiah. The spirit, too, can be censored. This is Bulgakov's concluding statement, the truth
which must not be named.
At dream's end, the White sympathizers, with Khludov, are returning to their
country. Russia may be wrong, but she is Mother. The lights at last blink out; dreamers
awake; the audience, too, is going home. Perhaps the street lamps have been lit. The
theatre, which is only illusion, evaporates. But madness hangs in the air.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avins, Carol. Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet
Literature, 1917-1934. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Bulgakov, Mikhail. Flight & Bliss. Trans. Myra Ginsburg. New York: New
Directions Publishing Corporation, 1969.

Cope, Jackson I. The Theater and the Dream, From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance
Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1973.

Curtis, J. A. E.. Bulgakov's Last Decade, The Writer as Hero. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1966.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York:
Science Editions, 1961.

Gogol, Nikolai V. "Diary of a Madman" (pp. 453-73) in The Collected Tales and
Plays of N. Gogol. Trans. Constance Garnett, ed. Leonard J. Kent. New York:
Pantheon, 1964.

Gorchakov, Nikolai. Stanislavski Directs. Tr. Miriam Goldina. New York:

Limelight Editions, 1985.

Jullian, Philippe. Dreamers of Decadence, Symbolist Painters of the 1890s. New

York: Praeger Publishers, 1971.

Lawler, James. The Existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Amsterdam: B. R.

Grüner Publishing Co., 1976.

Levy, Bernard-Henri, Barbarism with a Human Face. Trans. George Holoch. New
York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1977.

Morse, David. Romanticism, A Structural Analysis. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble
Books, 1982.

Orwell, George. 1984 . New York: New American Library, 1961.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY (cont.)

Proffer, Carl R. and Ellendea. The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov. Bloomington:
Indiana University, 1972.

Radek, Karl. Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism. Trans. P.Lavin. Detroit: The
Marxian Educational Society, 1921.

Riggan, William. Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First Person
Narrator. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.

Wright, A. Colin. Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations. Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 1978.

Yermolinsky, Sergey. Mikhail Bulgakov. Moscow, 1982.

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 MAD MESSIAH
MADNESS AND SALVATION IN
BULGAKOV'S
FLIGHT

Rob K Baum
Box 2414 Providence RI 02906

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i
Michel Foucault gives an exhaustive discussion on what is meant by "morality" in Volume 2 (The Use
of Pleasure) of his extensive treatise on human relationships, History of Sexuality, Tr. Robert Hurley,
New York: Vintage Books, 1986. I use the more ordinary (yet inclusive) definition here.
ii
Italics are mine.
iii
Although the English title Flight speaks to the questions of emigration and return, the Russian title
Beg is not directly translateable. It might also be "running" or "race." Bulgakov had considered
calling the play the Russian equivalent of "Cockroach Race," recalling the events of the Fifth Dream
(Act).
iv
Mikhail Bulgakov, Flight & Bliss, translated by Mirra Ginsburg, New York: New Directions
Publishing Corporation, 1969), p. 6. All quotations from Flight are drawn from this source.
v
Khludov remembers cockroaches falling into a pail of water, thus he calls the Commander in Chief's
abandonment of the Front "sinking into a pail of water."
vi
The type of people common to the pre-NEP--Lenin's New Economic Policy, an experiment in "free
enterprise" established by ukase in March 1921. NEP, a result of agricultural disasters and labour
landstill, created a veritable epidemic of Khlestakovianism, during which a host of so-called NEP-men
ranged Russia, fleecing people for all they were worth, feverishly amassing large fortunes before
disappearing abroad.
vii
The name "Krapilin" is quite as arch as Gogol or Beckett would have intended.
viii
Diverse translations insist upon "darkness" rather than the theatrical "blackout." Only two of the
dreams give any subsequent direction: "silence" in the fifth dream and "fades out forever" in the eight
and final dream.
ix
Later Slashchov was to return to Russia, "where incredibly he was pardoned and served in the Red
Army until 1928." (Wright, 125)
x
Matthew 12:25.
xi
At the risk of donning the Freudian duncecap, one could call them Khludov's testes.
xii
Displacing the physical hunger prevalent in Russian and Soviet drama. This is the essence of the
Khlestakovian figure, itself drawn from Gogol--always hungry.
xiii
Bulgakov hastily adapted the play from his novel White Guard (Belaya gvardiya) in 1925. Despite
its success, he was highly dissatisfied.
xiv
As when The Days of the Turbins is referred to in the 1927 farce The Crimson Island (Bagrovy
ostrov).
xv
Joseph Stalin in a letter to playwright Bill-Belotserkovsky, 2 February 1929.
xvi
Following Bulgakov's death by hereditary disease in 1940, Glavrepertkom gave permission for
Flight's publication, but it remained unpublished. In 1955, N. P. Akimov proposed production at
Theatre of the Lensoviet (honouring writer V. Kaverin, who inititated Bulgakov's rehabilitation); R.
Simonov and A. Abrikosov of the Vakhtangov proposed again in 1957. But neither production
occurred. Flight first opened at the Gorky Dramatic Theatre in Volgograd (Stalingrad) in March 1957.
xvii
Cited in Proffer, 129.
xviii
Cited in Proffer, 142. Pikel later became a "somewhat unwilling employee of the NKVD (acronym
of the Secret Police).
xix
"The present is too animated, too mercurial, it irritates the senses; and the writer's pen shifts
imperceptibly into satire...It has always seemed to me that in my life some great self-sacrifice awaits
me, and and that precisely in order to serve my native country I shall be obliged to go and develop
somewhere far away from it...'I knew only that I was going away not at all in order to delight in foreign
lands, but rather in order to endure, just as though I had had a presentiment that I would recognize the
worth of Russia only outside Russia, and that I would attain love for her far away from her.'" (Curtis,
1982: 125)
xx
Stanislavski proposed major alterations for this work, as well, feeling that Bulgakov was going off the
rails. A record of the dialogue between the two artists appears in Stanislavski Directs.
xxi
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita.
xxii
Bulgakov's early "motto, " submitted with a play to a writing contest: "To the free god of art!"