After Evgeny Zamiatin emigrated from the USSR in 1931, he was systematically airbrushed out of Soviet literary history, despite the central role he had played in the cultural life of Russia’s northern
Published in 1987, this book was the first full-length interpretative study in English of the later writings of the outstanding Soviet novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). The focus is the 1930s, the period when Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita, an extraordinary novel that has had a profound impact in the Soviet Union and which is now generally regarded as his masterpiece. Using material from Soviet archives and libraries, Dr Curtis suggests that Bulgakov's fundamental preoccupation in this movel with the destiny of literature and of the writer is reflected in other major works of the same period, in particular his writings on Pushkin and Molière. Bulgakov emerges as a belated romantic, a figure unique on the early Soviet literacy scene.
Over 2500 years after the city's fall, the Babylon of ancient Iraq is still an evocative name. The stories of the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens, Daniel in the Lions' Den, the madness of Nebuchad
