Mikhail Bulgakov and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin. Textology of a Theater Album

Personal collections of documents related to the performances of SukhovoKobylin’s and Bulgakov’s own plays have never been compared. Bulgakov practically never mentions Sukhovo-Kobylin in his texts. However, the “meeting” of the two playwrights took place in the space of the theatrical album. Unlike the literary album that has been studied many times, there are no special studies about the typology of the theatrical album and its cultural semantics. The textological study of album “autocollections” as drama companions contributes to the acquisition of semantic “keys” not only to certain texts, but also to those meta-links that they form as well as to the compilation of mobile text transcriptions. The album laboratories of the two playwrights make this similarity clear. The theatrical albums by Sukhovo-Kobylin (a blue blotter with envelopes of versions of plays that are part of the “Pictures of the Past” trilogy, held in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts) and Bulgakov (eight albums in the Handwritten Section of the IRLI) reveal two layers. One is an “encyclopedia” of theatrical history of plays, posters, reviews, accompanied by the author’s notes, and a detailed “dossier of censorship ordeals”. The other layer is newspaper clippings with author’s marginalities, marks that simulate a vocabulary universe and the library of plots reflecting newspaper reality and later turned into works. Thus, it is known that Sukhovo-Kobylin was one of the characters in V. Chernoyarov’s feuilleton “The National Team”, published in the magazine “Novyy Zritel” in 1926 and pasted into Bulgakov’s album related to the play The Days of the Turbins at the Moscow Art Theater in 1926. The specified album is an auto-documentary source of Theatrical Novel. The metamorphoses of the texts in the album, accompanied by the author’s notes, marginalities, typologically bring together the theatrical albums of Sukhovo-Kobylin and Bulgakov. They are related semiotically and visually to the scenario of a conventional play, the director’s staged copy, or the exhibition plan of the exposition. The playwrights quite obviously collect the dossier, the “data bank”, fixing the junctions, the path from the manuscript to the publication and the scene (especially in Bulgakov’s case), as if they were making up a biography of their own text. Bulgakov appreciates the author’s recipes and technical guidelines for making an author, formulated in feuilletons of the 1920s. By coincidence, Sukhovo-Kobylin got into this feuilleton environment.