About the work
Flight ("Eight Dreams") is a play by Mikhail Bulgakov about the retreat of the White Army and its entourage at the end of the Russian Civil War in 1920–21. Bulgakov wrote it in 1926–28; Stalin had it banned, reportedly because the defeated White generals appeared too sympathetically drawn. Never staged in the author's lifetime, it did not premiere until 29 March 1957, in Stalingrad.
Plot
From Crimea, General Khludov, the scholar Golubkov, his lover Serafima and the swaggering General Charnota flee the advancing Red Army to Constantinople and finally Paris. In eight dreamlike scenes, Bulgakov traces the moral and material decline of the émigrés as they struggle to survive in exile.
Cultural significance
By subtitling the play "Eight Dreams", Bulgakov deliberately distanced it from strict historical accuracy – it did not save the work from censorship. Its premiere only after Stalin's death made it a late marker of Bulgakov's cautious rehabilitation during the Thaw. Thomas Reschke's German translation remains part of the German stage-rights catalogue to this day.