Italian folk fairy tales, in an adaptation by Italo Calvino, served as the inspiration for this project. Having read many fairy tales, I started to comment visually on the characters, one by one, without connecting the drawings to any specific text, but rather by adhering to a general fantastic style. In order to immerse myself in the topic, I also conducted some research: I studied fairy tale elements and their graphical representation in medieval European books, the page ornamentation, their relations with handwritten text, and how the text intertwines and transforms itself into elements to become the heads and tails of fantastic beasts. 

Such a project developed from both the creative word-picture interpretation of fairy tales and theoretical study. The result was an MA thesis on the fantastic elements in medieval art, which I defended at the Academy of Arts in Milan.  

A totally new fairy tale was written to accompany the drawings and publish a limited edition of this book. The miniatures are printed on etching paper with slight relief of ink, like woodcut to the touch, and artisan bookbinding reproduces relief prints as well. 

I filled 13 large sheets with fantastic characters. Many say the precision and the technique of these miniature pencil drawings remind them of etchings. Each picture was meticulously developed in detail and can be framed as a single artwork. 

Diana Bychkova

Publications and awards

2005 - Winner of the gold-silver medal Cesare Frigerio, “for a great imagination and the execution of drawings in the technique of chiaroscuro”. (Corsico, Italy) 

2006 - Publication in the historical journal of graphics and art Grafica d’Arte, edited by Paolo Bellini (Milan, Italy)

2009 - Winner of the personal exhibition at the competition “Polar Expo” (Bergamo, Italy)

2009 - Participation in the exhibition “Fabularia”. (Milan, Italy)

2010 - Diploma at the competition “Book Image” at the International Book Fair (Moscow, Russia) 

Satires

This art work consists of a series 

of Diana Bychkova's original ink drawings and double-page collages

based on everyday satires about St. Petersburg from Sasha Cherny’s collected poems of 1907-1922 

 About the creation of this book: 

A research work has been conducted for this project at the National Library in Kyiv on the design of newspapers of the beginning of the 20th century, and on Russian futurist poetry. This work culminated in an MA thesis titled “The combination of photos, drawings and author’s manuscripts in the book illustration”. Finally, I developed a series of pictures based on Sasha Cherny’s satiric poems about everyday life in St. Petersburg and transferred them into etchings on zinc. 

Exhibitions and publications: 

2010 — A short report about pictures on S. Chernyi’s poems, published in the journal “Segretti di Bocca”, Milan, n. 25, p. 10. 

2010 — This series of illustrations “Satires” has been displayed in the exhibition Festa del Dialogo and published in the catalogue of the same name, GraFiMar: Milan, p.10-11. 

2010 — published as a mini-book by Alberto Casiraghi, Pulcinoelefante: Osnago, Italy.

Exhibitions and publications

2002 – the National Guild of Artists Exhibition, Kyiv, Ukraine. The series of illustrations passed the selection and was accepted to participate in the national exhibition 

2009 – exhibited at Festa del Dialogo, and published in the art catalogue of the same title, Milan, Italy.

2011 – the photos from this series were printed as a limited edition, in numbered/signed folders.

Illustrations for Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita:

a documentary-artistic approach.

(Published as a part of the PhD thesis on word-image translation, 2020)

    This part will be quite straightforward since I created this series of illustrations, book design and binding, concurrently with a short thesis in 2001-2002 as the final project for my BFA degree at the National Academy of Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. The research on the writer’s aesthetics and the word-image relationships, therefore, was part of the thesis. However, the project was reworked several times over the following 10 years. What I am going to present here is a brief summary of the main concepts of my approach to a visual interpretation of the novel.

The search for the appropriate style in pictures

   In order to interpret such a complex literary text in the form of pictures, I needed to study Bulgakov’s narrative style, his time period, ideology and what was not explicitly written by the author but rather remained between the lines. These features are embodied in the novel and had to appear in the illustrations.

   Bulgakov’s manuscripts and memoirs had been inaccessible to researchers for a long time. So, the works of the literary critic Lidij Yanovskaya (5 books and almost 60 articles about Bulgakov’s art and life) were my most reliable source.[1] Then the author’s manuscripts, having been passed on to the archives of Lenin Library in Moscow (now the Russian State Library), were classified and inaccessible. When working on my thesis, I managed to get a referral from my university to the Lenin Library, where I traveled to meet the director of the archives and to experience the reading of the primary source — the manuscripts — which, as is known, tell the reader more than the typed text. He brought Bulgakov’s handwritten notebooks to the reading room, sat down in front of me, leafed through the pages for 15 minutes in such a way that I could not read anything, then kindly agreed to make for me a few photocopies of some of the pages, which I used in my illustrations as visual materials. More than that was not allowed.

   The following are other resources, available in that period and used by me to work on the book.

•Some ideas, embodied in the illustrations, were inspired when I visited the “bad apartment” no. 50, on Sadovaya Street in Moscow, where Bulgakov lived for many years and where much of the story of The Master and Margarita is set. Experiencing the impressions that “this damned apartment” made, I wandered through the streets of old Moscow described in the novel, and this immersion into the environment of the author and the novel helped me in working on the story's atmosphere in my pictures.

•A collection of photographic materials and other documentary information, taken in Moscow's streets, museums and libraries. These materials reproduced the architecture of Moscow and included old newspapers and photos, as well as  images of the author’s contemporaries, who were the prototypes of Bulgakov’s characters.

•Archival materials from the Bulgakov Museum in Kyiv.

•Film adaptions of the novel and theater performances were viewed with the following question in mind: how were Bulgakov's literary features presented on the stage?

•Illustrations from different periods by various artists were collected: as many as illustrations dedicated to Gogol even though very few of them were published.

•Bulgakov’s short stories “The Capital in a Notebook”, based on autobiographical materials and the author's life in Moscow: from the journal Poligrafia, 1987; this material was published as a book in 2002.

•Bulgakova, Elena (the writer’s third wife), Literary Diaries, Moscow: Kniznaja palata, 1990.

•Losev, V. (at the time, director of the manuscript archives at the Lenin Library), Dnevnik Mastera i Margariti [Diaries of the Master and Margarita], Moscow: Vagrius, 2001.

•Losev, V. Fantastichesky roman o diavole [A fantastic novel about devil], Moscow: Gudjal-Press, 2002.

•Smeljansky, A.M., Mikhail Bulgakov v hudozestvennom teatre [Bulgakov at the Art Theater], Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986.

•Zemskaia, E.A. (the writer’s sister), Mikhail Bulgakov i ego rodnie: semejniy portret [Bulgakov and his relatives: a family portrait], Studia Philological, 2004.   

   Consequently, in light of what I had studied, the book design and pictures acquired a documentary-artistic tonality, which merged the archival materials, photos and manuscripts with the fictional storyline. Such documentary materials reflected the visual incarnation of the novel.

The effect of authenticity in connection to imaginary events operates at the border between reality and fiction. It is achieved by mingling real facts, realistic descriptions of places, figures from history and monuments with episodes that present magic and diabolic events. The mix of these two levels of meaning — the historical and the fantastic — is meant to help the reader suspend his disbelief (so to speak) in the existence of imaginary figures, which are realistically depicted along with well documented ones.

Novel Synopsis

Bulgakov's novel, written from 1928 to 1940 (the year of the author's death), is about a one-week visit by Satan and his entourage in Moscow at the height of Stalinism. This modern narrative strand alternates with a story known as the Jerusalem chapters which presents an alternative account of Jesus' arrest and crucifixion — a kind of fifth Gospel (according to Bulgakov). The two strands are intertwined and echo each other symbolically, thematically and in terms of the novel's overall story line. The protagonist of the novel is a man referred to as the Master. He writes a novel about the life of Jesus, and the reader of Bulgakov's novel is presented with the Master's story in the form of the aforementioned Jerusalem chapters. The Master's novel, being completely out of place in the virulently atheistic and demonic Stalinist system, ends up rejected while the Master is institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. It is at this point that Satan intervenes, as he arrives in Moscow in order to save the Master and the novel about Jesus. At the same time, Satan reunites the Master with the latter's lover — Margarita. The Master and Margarita is considered to be the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century.

The main constructive line of the novel and pictures.

   The narrative construction suggests the principle of “a novel inside a novel”. So, I followed the same principle and created two parallel constructions in the illustrations that interact with each other and create a complex visual message on several levels.

The main or “leading” line is composed of a sequence of still lifes (black and white photos), which I ideated, arranged in symbolic compositions, developed in terms of light and reflections, photographed on film negatives, and hand-printed on enlarger in a darkroom.

Such compositions are based on the intuitive combination of objects and their position and lighting. They are not designed to represent the plot literally but rather its associative-symbolic meaning and mood. The objects in the still lifes correspond to the inner world (psychology, emotions) and mood of the characters that they represent, without making concrete statements. 

    For example:

    In the still life for the chapter entitled “Never talk to strangers” (where Satan meets two Soviet writers, Ivan Bezdomny and Mikhail Berlioz, in a Moscow park), a small, pale vase in the forefront represents the young and unconfident poet Ivan Bezdomny while a lemon represents Berlioz’s head that ends up severed by a tram as a result of Satan's machinations.  Koroviev, a member of Satan's entourage who appears as a transparent figure and is seen by the two writers during this encounter, is made of clouded glass.

In the still life for the chapter entitled “Pontius Pilate” (one of the Jerusalem chapters), an ancient book, a spent candle, and a semi-transparent clock symbolize eternity, timelessness.

    In the still life for the chapter entitled “The incident at Griboyedov” (where Satan's assistants visit the building housing the Soviet Writers' Union and end up burning it down [for being a tool of Stalinist propaganda and for rejecting the Master's novel]), burning manuscripts in a cup represent the fire at the writers’ union.

   For the chapter entitled “Ivan is split in two” (where the aforementioned poet Ivan Bezdomny finds himself at the same psychiatric institution as the Master after having been driven mad by the encounter with Satan), the absurd situation at the hospital is placed on a plate of food: mixed salad, onions, cellophane reflections, potions, and two lemons are the symbols of the poet’s personality which has split in two as a result of his madness.

   In the still life for the chapter entitled “Praise be to the Rooster!” (where Satan's female assistant almost kills the director of the Moscow Variety Theater, Satan and his entourage having put on a magic show at this theater just before this incident), bread caught in a spider’s web — old and covered with dust — symbolizes the theater in the shade of Satan's black magic. A rotten apple refers to the director’s aching head. A brightly lit onion represents the cockerel that saves the director at the last moment from Satan's emissaries by crowing and signaling the beginning of dawn.

The key point is that it is not necessary (and impossible) that the reader grasp the meanings that I gave to these compositions. Their purpose is to create a certain emotional impact on the reader which, in correlation with the text, will generate new meanings and additional levels of perception — simultaneously through verbal and visual associations.

Large illustrations

I designed a series of 13 double-page illustrations which precede certain chapters. I also created 230 small ink drawings spread throughout the book which aim to function as linking elements between the large illustrations and to create a certain atmosphere bymeans of certain small ambient elements, e.g., aspects of historical buildings, bits and pieces of everyday life, signs or fragments. 

   The 13 large pictures are created in the technique of collage: photos of still lifes (as above) plus my ink drawings and the writer’s manuscripts. The formal compositions (the initial stage of sketching the concepts) looked like abstract pictures composed of grey, less dark, more dark, white and black spots; this was a necessary step meant to arrange the “weights” and to balance future content with form. Already at this stage, I knew what would be inserted in such spots, e.g., a piece of manuscript would be placed into a white spot; a burning cap that symbolizes a bonfire would end up in a black spot, the two being related to each other (conceptually) through the figure that would go in a grey stripe, and so forth.

   With reference to what has been discussed about the transition from abstract thought to physical items, and the necessity of joining both abstract and concrete features in pictures, I am suggesting that any abstract image represents only an initial concept (as a formal sketch of the composition) but is missing the concrete elements that would create dialectical complexity. Therefore, such formal/abstract compositions are filled with concrete items that relate associatively to each other. 

   The first thing that will catch the reader’s eye in the presence of an illustration, will be a still life (associative photo-compositions as above) surrounded by ink drawings and manuscripts. Thus, all objects around the still life will be perceived under the influence of the mood proposed by the photo.

   The frontispiece reproduces some ripped pages of Bulgakov’s manuscript, a picture representing Mephistopheles[2] which reflects a certain mood, and the writer’s photo with the following handwritten inscription over it: “This is what one looks like after dealing for several years with Aloziy Mogarych, Nikonor Ivanich, and others” (negative the characters from The Master and Margarita).

   The illustration that introduces the chapter entitled “Execution” (a Jerusalem chapter detailing the crucifixion of Jesus), for example, recreates the atmosphere of ancient Rome and the mood of the scenes in the story: antique books, architectural elements, the moon, parts of manuscripts with certain relevant phrases and so forth for each picture, 1, 2, etc.

   To separate the two plot lines in the illustrations — the time of Pontius Pilate and the 1930s in Moscow — I presented ancient world via silhouettes and the modern world in form of linear drawings.

   Furthermore, the still lifes within the whole book construction aim to add a rhythmical organization to the whole. They appear at the right moments and add a certain rhythm, while the 230 small drawings interspersed among them throughout the text do not interrupt the reading process. Their role is to recreate the environment through the representation of details of everyday life, architecture, streets, landscapes, etc. 

   Figuratively – this is like a pendulum clock ticking: it can be heard as long as you listen to it, but if you are distracted, then you forget about it. The moment your thoughts pause, the clock’s ticking captures again your attention. But the clock has not stopped, and nothing has interrupted the rhythm and time of the story and, regardless of whether you listen to it or not, it continues its journey.

   I developed this way the rhythm and mood of the entire movement within the book’s structure. Apart from that, the photos and manuscripts, as a medium per se, are the archival/documentary materials. Thus, even if the fiction photo-compositions are entirely created by me, they make the reader’s subconscious mind believe in the ‘truth’ that they represent.

   “Manuscripts do not burn”. This key phrase from the novel (uttered by the devil as he reconstitutes the Master's lost novel) has become a pithy saying known throughout the Russian cultural realm. It carries such a powerful philosophical meaning that it has taken on a life of its own — all the more so in a society which has always had a problem with freedom of expression. This is why I placed a printed fragment of still life with burning manuscripts on the book cover. The bookbinding is made from natural black leather with a relief print of fire. Images of manuscripts are also reproduced on the edges of the book.

Never deal with the author’s rights 

(reminiscent of Bulgakov’s first chapters entitled “Never talk to strangers”), 

or

The artistic and editorial path of the book.

The following short excerpt is about the relations between creativity and copyright, and my struggle with both Bulgakov’s devilry and his heirs. This section presents a part of the creative process and supports the idea that without an in-depth study of the writer’s cultural background and his art, my creative involvement as an illustrator would be impossible.

   Completed in 2002, the illustrations passed through a process of competitive selection and were accepted to participate in the National Guild of Artists Exhibition in Kyiv. This gave me the right to become a member of the National Guild of Artists. But I decided not to use this right.

   One week before the thesis defence and the presentation of the entire project with a visual series at the Academy exhibit, my work has, which had taken a year to complete, suddenly disappeared from my computer. When working on the documentary materials and then my pictures, I had become completely immersed in the world of the novel, and this process was echoed in the "diablerie" that followed me at each step. It’s strange that even the title of the first handwritten version of The Master ..., “A novel about the devil” did not alarm me. Several times Mikhail Bulgakov himself came to me in a dream — with a cigar in his teeth as he appears on one photo, in a bow tie and in a pince-nez. We discussed the book for a long time, then he disappeared ... and the text disappeared from the computer as well. Then the text reappeared, but all my drawings disappeared, leaving an empty folder with zero megabytes… And when my nerves were in the state of an active volcano, when hope was dying, the drawings suddenly returned by themselves. I swore to abandon urgently the devilry novel and to begin another literary work by another author, but could not do this for some inexplicable reason.

    The work on the pictures and book structure continued thereafter for a couple of years. When I attempted to propose this book project for publication at various publishing houses whom I approached at book fairs in Moscow in 2002-2006, the response was always the same: they were interested in the pictures, but when they heard the name Bulgakov, they did not want to deal with this. Some were afraid of Bulgakov’s devilry and misfortune that may come along it, others had more pragmatic reasons and did not want to go through issues with copyright holders.  Both types of publishers turned out to be right. Bulgakov’s artistic power had captured and kept my attention for a decade. In 2009, the art-photos from the series were exhibited in Milan and published as folders in a limited edition. I returned to this project again in Italy in 2007 and then in 2011, when trips to Rome evoked the Jerusalem chapters of Bulgakov's novel. At this point, I completely reworked the rhythmical structure of the book, layout, some of the small drawings, rearranged the large illustrations, polished certain details… and got immersed again in the writer’s manuscripts, transferring their fragments to the pictures and to the book edges. In the same year, accidentally, when I traveled back to my native town in Ukraine and went to a dentist who had to extract my wisdom tooth, I found out that his last name was Bulgakov, and that he was born in the same day, month and year as my husband (“Oh! He does not leave you even there!” – my teacher from art school said). Even more ironically, upon my return to Milan, I met accidentally a publisher of limited editions from Parma, Fermo Editore: he had come to the Pecorini bookshop with a presentation, and I had come to the same shop and at the same time to deliver some copies of my children’s books. Fermo got interested in my books, asked me to show him my other projects, and my Bulgakov attracted his attention. He decided to publish a limited edition of 300 copies. In order to obtain the permission of Bulgakov’s heir (a grandson who has no direct relation either to the writer or to his works, being the son of Bulgakov’s third wife’s son by her other husband) and to publish the novel in a foreign language, one needs to contact that grandson’s representative in England, who negotiates on the heir’s behalf. Both the heir and the representative wanted to receive some of the royalties and tried to get more money while offering the fewest possible rights. They requested that the publisher pay an amount for the author’s rights, the entire sum at the moment of signing the agreement (i.e. an advance rather than royalties after sales), while normally the author’s rights are not paid that way even to living writers. Considering the fact that this had to be an edition in the realm of high culture (i.e. the kind that sells very badly but has other/artistic purposes), and given the costs and time of the translation of the entire novel, editorial production, expensive materials, potential distribution, etc., the project did not turn out to be worthwhile for the publisher.

   According to the law of the Russian Federation, The Master and Margarita will be in the public domain 70 years after the first publication (1967) which occurred 27 years after the author’s death. Who knows, maybe in 2037 the publication of my pictures and Bulgakov’s novel under a common book cover will become possible.

   In the same year, in 2011, Lidij Yanovskaya, the literary critic and biographer of Bulgakov, died. I had an intimate knowledge of her work and almost seemed to know her personally. At that point, my work on the book ended. 

[1]Yanovskaya had the opportunity to study the writer’s life, works and manuscripts only in a short period of time, a few years before the death of the writer’s wife, the friendship with whom brought Yanovskaya to writing important books with little-known facts and discoveries.

[2] The sculpture was created by Mark Antokolsky in 1883, based on Goethe’s Faust. Some critics (Losev, and then others) draw many relations between Bulgakov’s Voland and Margarita and Goethe’s Mephistopheles and Margarita; thus, the figure of Mephistopheles seems to be relevant to this illustration.