The grotesque satire of Michail Bulgakov’s ‘povesti’: Russia tragic carnivalization in the Twenties

Abstract

At the end of 1921 Mikhail Bulgakov, a young doctor from Kiev with literary expectations, finally moved to Moscow. The capital of the new Soviet world is entering into the Nep’s years, featured by the figure of a new social climber, the nepman. Moscow and the entire Russia are changing, by staging a kind of huge Carnival of which Bulgakov chooses to portrait its contradictory and paradoxal nature throughout the instruments of a grotesque satire. The writer intends to represent the relativity and absurdity of situations that cross the threshold of reality to penetrate the world of paradox and absurd, where mistaken identities, amazing discoveries and unlikely experiments may be read as dethronizations of inauthentic heroes, unmasking of false myths, tragi-comic teasing of the authoritarian word.

This paper analyses three examples of the bulgakovian satire in the ‘povesti’ D’javoliada,  Rokovye jajca e Sobač’e serdce and, with the aid of Bachtin’s interpretations, it suggests a new reading of the three writings and an insight into the reasons for the choice of the satirical genre in the whole literary work of the writer.