ANATOLY  SMELIANSKY

Translated by Arch Tait

Methuen, 1993
Hardback, £20
ISBN 0-413-63070-6
374 pages

I can think of no book that better conveys what it was like to live as an artist in this brilliant yet terrible period, none that reveals more about its best known theatre, and none that so movingly celebrates its outstanding dramatic genius.
Edward Braun, New Theatre Quarterly

In this fascinating analysis of the relationship between an author, his theatre and the Soviet State, Anatoly Smeliansky has drawn on his unique access to the Moscow Art Theatre archives to unearth the truth behind Black Snow, Bulgakov's bitter satire on the theatre and its greatest hero Konstantin Stanislavsky, his novel The Master and Margarita and Batum, the anti-Stalin play which, at the height of the terror, he dared to send to the dictator for his sixtieth birthday.