Film adaptations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s works: Literary source and its interpretation

Over the course of more than fifty years, thirteen of M. Bulgakov’s works have been adapted for the screen: The Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog, Flight, The White Guard, Days of the Turbins, The Fatal Eggs, Morphine, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, The Red Crown, Ivan Vasilievich, A Theatrical Novel, The Crimson Island, and The Last Days. The novel The Master and Margarita holds the record for the most screen adaptations in cinema: twelve films. The play Flight has been adapted for the screen three times, and the stories Heart of a Dog and The Fatal Eggs have also been adapted three times. A Young Doctor’s Notebook and the story Morphine were combined into a single script twice. The film versions are so different that they were perceived, both immediately and over time, as classic interpretations and examples of fakes and “failed” films. Despite the critical level of assessments, one cannot help but see the significant achievements of filmmakers (A. Alov and V. Naumov, V. Basov, L. Gaidai, V. Bortko), more modest ones (M. Yakzhen, Yu. Kara) and completely controversial to admirers of the classic author and the connoisseurs of Bulgakov (films by A. Lattuada, S. Lomkin, A. Balabanov, S. Snezhkin, M. Lokshin). The article presents a brief overview of screen adaptations with their very risky innovation, sometimes with a political bias towards the literary source, which has its own author’s concept, plot movement, and the logic of constructing episodes. But the “translation” of the literary source into a script and into the language of cinema is a “re-creation”, in fact a new work of art, and literary scholars have to take this into account, since the very perception of the cinematic text changes in all its new “film composition”, in its entirety.

M. Bulgakov, literary source, screen adaptation, interpretation, film, script, director, cinematic text, cinematic language, cinematic image, historical memory, politics and aesthetics