The story of the author of "The Master and Margarita" will sound like a tense plot about freedom, censorship, and the price of inner independence. Convenient labels are often attached to the biographies of great writers: classic, mystic, satirist, author from the school curriculum. The Cultural Club meeting with Dmitry Shamonov helps to dust off the usual image and examine the author's fate through conflicts, decisions, and texts that are still read sharply. The talk will be about Mikhail Bulgakov - a man who understood the tragic nature of the revolution early on and wrote a novel about it that did not see publication during his lifetime. The center of the conversation will be plays that experienced loud premieres and almost immediate bans, complex relationships with power, the impossibility of fitting into the camp of the "whites" or "reds," as well as the paradoxical situation where recognition of talent coexisted with pressure and creative unfreedom. A separate line of the lecture will be the writer's last novel, thanks to which the phrase "manuscripts do not burn" became part of the cultural code. Find other events in St. Petersburg on KudaGo.