• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.23
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• pp.127-165
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• 2011

This paper focuses on the specificities and semantic meaning of Mikhail Bulgakov's metadrama White Guard and The Flight. The standard conception of metadrama is to purposefully break the dramatic illusion and make bare a playwright's self-consciousness of the theatrical art itself. With the use of the metadrama Bulgakov expressed the essentials of ugly reality, which he couldn't accept as a valuable truth. In this respect, Bulgakov's metadrama becomes at once a window, from which he views the external world in the theatrical vision, and a mirror, in which his political and existential stance as a playwright is reflected. In White Guard Bulgakov described the already theatricalized reality through several instances of 'play-within-play'. In The Flight, composed of eight pieces of dream, a life turned out to be a less solid and less firm reality than dream. Continuously demolishing the cognitive wall between reality and illusion, Bulgakov leads spectators to have a reflective view on the reality. Allowing more powerful demonstrativeness for a play-within-play than for a play-within-play, Bulgakov elevates a metadramatic technique to the level of thematic structure.