Notes on the Cuff & Other Stories by Mikhail Bulgakov

Last night I read Notes on the Cuff & Other Stories by Mikhail Bulgakov. I’ve been a big fan of Bulgakov for many years. He is one of my top 20 favorite modern authors. He is well known for his satirical masterpiece The Master & Margarita and his novella Heart of a Dog. Bulgakov was a Christian who wrote during the early Soviet period. He was quite critical of what he saw as both the inherent evil and absurdity of socialism. Because of this, much of his work was banned during his lifetime though he himself avoided the gulag. Indeed, of all the short stories in Notes on the Cuff & Other Stories, only “Notes on the Cuff” was ever originally published, and even then with severe edits by the censors.

The title story is quite good. Late last year I read Bulgakov’s Black Snow (also published as A Dead Man's Memoir and A Theatrical Novel) which appears to be the sequel to “Notes on the Cuff”. Both seem to be about a struggling writer attempting to survive and create a career amidst the Muscavite literati of Soviet Russia. Both works are heavily autobiographical though the narrator struggles more than Bulgakov did and is far less successful. But while Black Snow is a more continuous narrative and mostly a satire specifically about the Soviet theatre system, “Notes on the Cuff” jumps around to different parts of Soviet literature: novelists, poets, playwrights, publishers, producers, etc. The story also has several sections where up-and-coming writers talk (often hilariously) about the great Russian writers of the past (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, etc.). If you like a writer writing about writers talking about writers, this is quite fun. And, again, very humorous.

This is where Bulgakov’s extraordinary gift comes in. While he could create great historical dramas (see The White Guard), comedy and satire was what distinguished him from all his contemporaries. Bulgakov had the ability to observe a situation of which everyone else was apparently taking seriously, see its absolute absurdity, and then spin the whole episode into literary gold. Obviously, such situations abound in socialism. Leaders would make foolish decisions causing chaos and disaster while most everyone else spoke highly of the decision and how great the result actually was, usually out of fear. Walter Wink designated such a system “delusion and domination”, while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dubbed it the “great lie”. Bulgakov saw the absurdity of the lie and the pretentions of those who went along with it. He responded by highlighting the absurdity and becoming absurd himself. So the devil and his entrourage visits fervently atheistic Soviet Union, a stray dog takes human form, and enormous quantity of large and overly aggressive snakes fight the Red Army. In Notes on the Cuff, Bulgakov is not quite at the level of magical realism for which he would become famous. However, the critique of the absurd and the willful delusion of the masses is already present. This is early Bulgakov.

I recommend this book and others by the author (particularly The Master & Margarita and Heart of a Dog). This particular book is a quick and easy read. Again, “Notes on the Cuff” is very good. “The Red Crown” and “The Komarov Case” are two other short stories in this collection that are choice reads.