Mikhail Bulgakov

The battle for Bulgakov's nationality

Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a cultural cold war over the nationality of one of the world's most celebrated playwrights

Kelly Nestruck
Thu 11 Dec 2008 15.21 GMT

Few would disagree that Mikhail Bulgakov is a great writer. But is the man who wrote Flight and A Cabal of Hypocrites a great Russian writer, or a great Ukrainian writer? Or, can any country that exists today really lay full claim to him?

I didn't give these questions much thought until visiting Kiev recently. There, Vitaly Malakhov, an acclaimed Ukrainian director who started the Bulgakov international art festival seven years ago, debated the question of Bulgakov's nationality with me.

The identity crisis arises it seems because although Bulgakov was born in what is now Ukraine's capital, a city he immortalized in his first novel The White Guard, the playwright and novelist was ethnically Russian, wrote in Russian and moved to Moscow when he was 21. So, while in a recent poll of Russians, the author of The Master and the Margharita was named the country's second greatest writer, in similar poll in Ukraine, he was claimed as Ukraine's third best playwright. The mixed opinions on nationality aren't any less muddy elsewhere in the world of letters. Take, for example, Bernard Shaw – described as an Irish dramatist despite living in England most of his life – or Polish-born Tom Stoppard, who is nearly always referred to as a British playwright.

The issue is, understandably, more politically fraught in Ukraine. As Malakhov said, "the problem is, that before 1990, we were all thought of as Russian". I was reminded of this recently when Anton Chekhov's dacha in Yalta, Ukraine hit the news. The playwright's Crimean house, where he wrote both Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, is falling apart, but the governments of Ukraine and Russia have been in a stand-off over who should pay to fix it up.

It's a cultural cold war with little sign of tensions easing; Nikolai Gogol is another playwright often pulled into the fray. Although Gogol wrote in Russian, ethnically he was Ukrainian and his comic stories drew extensively on his Ukrainian background. The war over Gogol's nationality though, is fought everywhere from scholarly journals to Wikipedia. Alas, there are no government inspectors coming to town to rule on the subject.

In an ideal world, the multi-faceted identities of famous literary figures would be used to promote intercultural understanding, rather than fuel rival nationalisms. Kiev's Bulgakov festival attempted just that, by bringing together theatre-makers and artists from around the world – including Russia and Georgia.

As Igor Volkov, an actor who participated in the festival, told me: "Bulgakov's work unites people from different parts of the world and people with different political views." So does Gogol's and Chekhov's. As LP Hartley wrote, "the past is a foreign country," and that's the borderless country to which all great writers eventually get citizenship – regardless of where they were born or in which language they originally wrote.

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