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“... In an early chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s funny and frightening novel, The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940 and now available in four different English translations, a character loses his head – literally. He slips on a Moscow street and is hit by a tram. His last thought is ‘Can this be?’ and his severed head then bounces away across the cobblestones ...”

“... or opponents such as Nikolai Gumilyev, Georgy Ivanov, Vladislav Khodosevich, and prose works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman, Anatoly Platonov and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, for publishing which abroad he was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1958, is due to appear next year; and publication of some of Nabokov’s novels has ...”

“... anyway.’ The city is no longer the urban Russian island in a rural Ukrainian sea described by Mikhail Bulgakov in The White Guard, his novel about the Russian Civil War. It is a comfortably bilingual place, most of whose schools and colleges use Ukrainian as a teaching medium, but where Russian is commonly spoken. The uncertain atmosphere ...”

“... After all, who didn’t go through the most improbable adventure during the civil war? Mikhail Bulgakov, Black Snow When a Lebanese wants your attention, he lowers his voice. You draw closer, and he asks: ‘Do you want to hear a story?’ If you say yes, and everyone does, you’re hooked. You listen. In the most Lebanese of his novels, Little Mountain, Elias Khoury tells a story about stories ...”

“... Erofeyev acknowledges, involved a real loss; throughout the Soviet period, from Zamyatin through Bulgakov and Pasternak to Solzhenitsyn, writing had displayed a ‘worthy resistance to tyranny’. But the loss has also released ‘the energy that is indispensable for a full journey . . the new Russian literature flutters out of its mine cage. The intensity ...”

“... the grotesque, the supernatural and the utopian, in a line that includes not only Gogol and Bulgakov – presently the two most fashionable masters – but such diverse figures as Chernyshevsky, Leskov, Bely, Zamiatin, Nabokov, Platonov and others. What is new in the current versions of this tradition is their cocktail of heterogeneous genres and tropes ...”