140. Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, 92–4 (July 1929). Bulgakov had just had a chapter of a new novel rejected for publication. On July 30, 1929, A. Svidersky, a former agricultural commissar overseeing arts in the enlightenment commissariat, reported sympathetically to Alexander Smirnov, a Central Committee secretary, about a long conversation with Bulgakov, whom he characterized as “a person hounded and doomed. I am not even sure his nerves are healthy. His situation is genuinely hopeless.” Svidersky supported Bulgakov’s request to go abroad. Smirnov agreed in a note to Molotov (Aug. 3, 1929). “‘Polozhenie ego deistvitel’no bezyskhodnoe,’” 116 (APRF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 239, l. 6); Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 115. Bulgakov was not allowed to leave.
141. Stalin had the letter circulated to the upper party and state ranks. Oktiabr’, 1987, no. 6: 176–80; Milne, Mikhail Bulgakov, 268–74.
142. Bulgakova, Dnevnik, 299–300; Bulgakov and Bulgakova, Dnevnik Mastera i Margarity, 497; Bulgakov, Vospominaniia, 394 (L. E. Belozerskaya); “‘Polozhenie ego deistvitel’no bezyskhodnoe’”: 116 (APRF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 239, l. 6); Fleishman, “O gibeli maiakovskovo kak ‘literaturnom fakte,’” 128; Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 127 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 783, l. 11). See also Gromov, Stalin, 114–6.
143. Woroszylski, Life of Mayakovsky, 514–30 (esp. 526); Sundaram, “Manufacturing Culture,” 75–87. Trotsky wrote an obituary (Biulleten’ oppozitsii, May 11, 1930), but Stalin stayed publicly silent. More than 100,000 mourners, with no prompting from the state, had turned out for Mayakovsky’s burial in the Novodevichy Cemetery, a number surpassed only at Lenin’s Red Square funeral. Boyrn, “Death of the Revolutionary Poet,” 158.
Mayakovsky was involved in a recent romance with a very young married woman, the actress Veronika Polonskaya, who refused to leave her husband. On April 14, when he shot himself in the heart, Polonskaya had just left his apartment to attend a rehearsal against his protestations. Rumors spread that the bullet removed from Mayakovsky did not match the revolver he owned (a prop in a play), and that neighbors had heard two shots. Ten days after the poet’s death, the investigating police officer was killed. The handwritten suicide note, however, was unquestionably Mayakovsky’s. “The idea of suicide was like a chronic disease inside him,” his former lover and muse Lily Brik would write, “and like any chronic disease it worsened under circumstances that, for him, were undesirable.” The official report of his death stated that “the suicide was caused by reasons of a purely personal order, having nothing in general to do with the public and literary activity of the poet, the suicide was preceded by an illness from which the poet still had not completely recovered.” Pravda, April 15, 1930. The suicide spurred the removal of the poet’s works from children and youth libraries. Literaturnaia gazeta, July 10, 1930. See also Brown, Mayakovsky; and Terras, Vladimir Mayakovsky.
144. On May 30, 1931, Bulgakov wrote a long letter to Stalin, quoting Gogol, vainly requesting a long rest holiday in Europe, stating he had never been abroad, contrary to published accounts, and pledging his loyalty (“I do not know if the Soviet theater needs me, but I need the Soviet theater like oxygen”). Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 147–50 (otdel rukopisi GPB, f. 562, k. 19, d. 30). In 1931, Stalin allowed both Pilnyak and Zamyatin to travel to Western Europe, and in 1932 Babel would be permitted to travel to Paris, where his wife was undergoing an operation. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 180 (APRF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 206, l. 21).
145. Paustovsky, Story of a Life, 63–5. Bulgakov persisted in his supplications to be permitted to travel to France and Italy, writing to Stalin (June 11, 1934) that functionaries must be afraid he would defect. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 210–3 (APRF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 206, l. 37–380b.). Bulgakov would write one more letter to Stalin (Feb. 1938) about the fate of his friend Nikolai Erdman.
