SOURCE: Curtis, J. A. E. “Mikhail Bulgakov and the Red Army's Polo Instructor: Political Satire in The Master and Margarita.” In The Master and Margarita: A Critical Companion, edited by Laura D. Weeks, pp. 211-26. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Curtis provides a biographical account of Bulgakov's involvement with American diplomats in Russia and argues that the author satirized his experience in The Master and Margarita.

In the mid-1930s the aristocratic game of polo was introduced to Stalin's Red Army. The man responsible for this improbable feat was Charles Thayer, a young diplomat at the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow. For many years after the 1917 Revolution no formal diplomatic ties existed between the USSR and the United States. In 1932, however, Franklin Roosevelt made it a plank of his presidential campaign that diplomatic relations should be restored, not least because of the need...