Melville House Books

Mikhail Bulgakov

In a story that echoes the ongoing fight between the Ukraine and Russia over who is responsible for the upkeep of Anton Chekhov‘s house in Yalta where he wrote some of his greatest work — as a Guardian story explains, the house was in Ukraine, but the writer, or course, was a Russian — another fight has broken out between the Ukraine and Russia over who owns the literary legacy of another great writer: that of Mikhail Bulgakov. As Kelly Nestruck reports in another Guardian story, “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.” Says Nestuck, “In an ideal world, the multi-faceted identities of famous literary figures would be used to promote intercultural understanding, rather than fuel rival nationalisms.” Instead, it just seems to get more and more complicated. For example, Nikolai Gogol is often pulled into the fray — seems he wrote in Russian but was an ethnic Ukrainian. Thus, says Nestruck, “The war over Gogol’s nationality though, is fought everywhere from scholarly journals to Wikipedia.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.