Never deal with the author’s rights
(reminiscent of Bulgakov’s first chapters entitled “Never talk to strangers”),
or
The artistic and editorial path of the book.
The following short excerpt is about the relations between creativity and copyright, and my struggle with both Bulgakov’s devilry and his heirs. This section presents a part of the creative process and supports the idea that without an in-depth study of the writer’s cultural background and his art, my creative involvement as an illustrator would be impossible.
Completed in 2002, the illustrations passed through a process of competitive selection and were accepted to participate in the National Guild of Artists Exhibition in Kyiv. This gave me the right to become a member of the National Guild of Artists. But I decided not to use this right.
One week before the thesis defence and the presentation of the entire project with a visual series at the Academy exhibit, my work has, which had taken a year to complete, suddenly disappeared from my computer. When working on the documentary materials and then my pictures, I had become completely immersed in the world of the novel, and this process was echoed in the "diablerie" that followed me at each step. It’s strange that even the title of the first handwritten version of The Master ..., “A novel about the devil” did not alarm me. Several times Mikhail Bulgakov himself came to me in a dream — with a cigar in his teeth as he appears on one photo, in a bow tie and in a pince-nez. We discussed the book for a long time, then he disappeared ... and the text disappeared from the computer as well. Then the text reappeared, but all my drawings disappeared, leaving an empty folder with zero megabytes… And when my nerves were in the state of an active volcano, when hope was dying, the drawings suddenly returned by themselves. I swore to abandon urgently the devilry novel and to begin another literary work by another author, but could not do this for some inexplicable reason.
The work on the pictures and book structure continued thereafter for a couple of years. When I attempted to propose this book project for publication at various publishing houses whom I approached at book fairs in Moscow in 2002-2006, the response was always the same: they were interested in the pictures, but when they heard the name Bulgakov, they did not want to deal with this. Some were afraid of Bulgakov’s devilry and misfortune that may come along it, others had more pragmatic reasons and did not want to go through issues with copyright holders. Both types of publishers turned out to be right. Bulgakov’s artistic power had captured and kept my attention for a decade. In 2009, the art-photos from the series were exhibited in Milan and published as folders in a limited edition. I returned to this project again in Italy in 2007 and then in 2011, when trips to Rome evoked the Jerusalem chapters of Bulgakov's novel. At this point, I completely reworked the rhythmical structure of the book, layout, some of the small drawings, rearranged the large illustrations, polished certain details… and got immersed again in the writer’s manuscripts, transferring their fragments to the pictures and to the book edges. In the same year, accidentally, when I traveled back to my native town in Ukraine and went to a dentist who had to extract my wisdom tooth, I found out that his last name was Bulgakov, and that he was born in the same month and year as my husband (“Oh! He does not leave you even there!” – my teacher from art school said).
Even more ironically, upon my return to Milan, I met accidentally a publisher of limited editions from Parma, Fermo Editore: he had come to the Pecorini bookshop with a presentation, and I had come to the same shop and at the same time to deliver some copies of my children’s books. Fermo got interested in my books, asked me to show him my other projects, and my Bulgakov attracted his attention. He decided to publish a limited edition of 300 copies. In order to obtain the permission of Bulgakov’s heir (a grandson who has no direct relation either to the writer or to his works, being the son of Bulgakov’s third wife’s son by her other husband) and to publish the novel in a foreign language, one needs to contact that grandson’s representative in England, who negotiates on the heir’s behalf. Both the heir and the representative wanted to receive some of the royalties and tried to get more money while offering the fewest possible rights. They requested that the publisher pay an amount for the author’s rights, the entire sum at the moment of signing the agreement (i.e. an advance rather than royalties after sales), while normally the author’s rights are not paid that way even to living writers. Considering the fact that this had to be an edition in the realm of high culture (i.e. the kind that sells very badly but has other/artistic purposes), and given the costs and time of the translation of the entire novel, editorial production, expensive materials, potential distribution, etc., the project did not turn out to be worthwhile for the publisher.
According to the law of the Russian Federation, The Master and Margarita will be in the public domain 70 years after the first publication (1967) which occurred 27 years after the author’s death. Who knows, maybe in 2037 the publication of my pictures and Bulgakov’s novel under a common book cover will become possible.
In the same year, in 2011, Lidij Yanovskaya, the literary critic and biographer of Bulgakov, died. I had an intimate knowledge of her work and almost seemed to know her personally. At that point, my work on the book ended.
[1]Yanovskaya had the opportunity to study the writer’s life, works and manuscripts only in a short period of time, a few years before the death of the writer’s wife, the friendship with whom brought Yanovskaya to writing important books with little-known facts and discoveries.
[2] The sculpture was created by Mark Antokolsky in 1883, based on Goethe’s Faust. Some critics (Losev, and then others) draw many relations between Bulgakov’s Voland and Margarita and Goethe’s Mephistopheles and Margarita; thus, the figure of Mephistopheles seems to be relevant to this illustration.
