Don’t use the Cyrillic alphabet for English words. Just don’t do it. Please.
Mikhail Bukgalov is one of my favorite writers and I believe many people share my opinion, because his collection of short stories, A Country Doctor’s Notebook, has a six-week waiting list at our local library. A Country Doctor’s Notebook was published forty years ago, 1975, and was written decades before. The publishing industry calls that ‘having legs’!
So, it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to make a T.V. show out of it.
A Young Doctor’s Notebook, Sky Art’s dramatization of Bulgakov’s stories, fails spectacularly. This is a failure so complete that I’m left wondering if the script-writers and producers understood what they were reading when they picked up Bulgakov and flipped pages “obsessively” like the star Daniel Radcliffe. I’m left wondering if the creators of A Young Doctor’s Notebook are even human.
Take episode two, for example. The poignant tale An Embroidered Hand-Towel is striped of the beauty and humanity which I tried to describe in this post, and turned into a slap-stick farce where a drug-addled ‘Bulgakov’ chases his younger self around the operating theater, while stumbling and sliding in the blood and severed limbs of an eight-year-old amputee, who lies unconscious on the table.
Stop and think about that for a second, because the T.V. show really is as monstrous as I’ve described. Is this comedy? Or is this program a not-so-subtle attack on Bulgakov, with an accidental ‘outing’ of the writers’/director’s/producers’ own mental illness? (Perhaps ‘mental illness’ is too kind, maybe they just lack a soul.)
Notably absent from this production is the sense of humility which the author learns through spending time with “backward” Russian peasants. In his stories, Bulgakov describes these peasants as traditional, wise, strong people who are also ignorant at times. Bulgakov learns over the course of his rural residency that his arrogance and “big city” provincialism are just a different type of provincialism. He learns wisdom and humility from these “backward” people.
But the writers in London and Los Angeles have missed the point; because this series does nothing but mock hay-seeds. The fairy-tales of the ‘educated classes’ are the most fanciful of all; also the most blind.
Instead, these writers focus on shitty bum-prints on chairs; unf*ckable (yet syphilitic) Russian women; and how much fun and sex you’d have if you were a Bolshevik.
This pathetic series is just a ‘next step’ in the British-lead character assassination of Bulgakov: belaboring drug addiction; suggesting his mother was neglectful; suggesting that he had contempt for peasants RATHER than the Bolshevik apparatchiks he consistently lampoons in his stories.
So who wrote this smut? According to producers Big Talk Productions:
Writers: Mark Chappell, Shaun Pye, Alan Connor
Producer: Clelia Mountford
Director: Alex Hardcastle
Executive Producers: Kenton Allen, Matthew Justice and Jon Hamm for Jennifer Westfeldt’s Points West Pictures (Jon Hamm and Jennifer Westfeldt are lovers; note how Jon’s ‘years active’ coincides with the start of their relationship.)
If you care to click any of those links above, you’ll be inundated with the career-stories of typical Brit media executives; these people are by no means exceptional or ‘outliers’. This sorry lot is representative of the people who write what you’re asked to watch.
Normally, I wouldn’t be so disgusted by another smutty T.V. offering. However, this one is represents a bastardization of truly inspired writing and will put thinking people off an author who everyone should be reading. They’ve set literature and education back.
This inbred bunch of media professionals are continuing a peculiarly British tradition of misrepresenting and cheapening Bulgakov. The gold standard of this practice is represented by the work of Prof. Lesley Milne, as I’ve posted about here. The British establishment carries a special hatred for men and women with political views like Mikhail Bulgakov: anti-Bolshevik, pro-tradition, pro- Russia. A Young Doctor’s Notebook is merely the latest offering in this hateful spewing.
Bulgakov is exceptional because he understood the relationship between the Bolshevik leadership and their US/UK/German financial supporters. He understood the role that the secret service ANYWHERE plays in undermining the Arts in service of the State. He understood Cultural Marxism. And he told stories really well, which made him deadly to the ‘revolutionary establishment‘.
That, dear readers, is why the current British regime doesn’t like him. Kill your T.V. and Happy Reading!
By the way, any readers interested in the ridiculous situation in the Ukraine will do well to read The Master and Margarita; or short of that, a couple of my posts on the Mikhail Bulgakov page. There is nothing new under the sun.
