About the work
Ivan Vasilievich is a comedy in three acts by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in 1934–35 as a reworking of his unfinished play "Bliss". A time machine sends the residents of a Moscow apartment building back to the sixteenth century while Ivan the Terrible is thrown forward into the Soviet present. After a dress rehearsal on 13 May 1936 at Moscow's Theatre of Satire, the play was banned and remained unperformed during Bulgakov's lifetime.
Plot
Engineer Timofeyev has secretly built a time machine. When his neighbour, building superintendent Bunsha, and a petty thief are caught up in it, they swap places with Ivan the Terrible: the tsar ends up bewildered in present-day Moscow, while Bunsha and the thief must pose as tsar in the sixteenth-century Kremlin.
Cultural significance
Censors apparently feared its implication that any ordinary man could pass for a dictator. The play was first published only in 1965; its stage premiere followed in 1967 at the Omsk Drama Theatre and the Moscow Theatre of Film Actors, thirty-one years after the banned rehearsal. It became far better known through Leonid Gaidai's 1973 film adaptation.