George Whitman reads outside his Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in 2007. Photos by Jim Donnelly and Ard van der Leeuw

CFA salutes George Whitman (COM’35, SMG’35), who died at 98 shortly before Christmas, founded Shakespeare and Company, a harbor for any writer from expatriate celebrities to drug-addled wannabes, in 1951. Bracketed by the Seine and Notre-Dame, the store, named after the French bookshop that was the Jazz Age haunt of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, attracted its own literary glitterati for readings and book signings, among them Nin, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.

His generosity and kindness will be remembered by his family, countless friends, writers, fellow bibliophiles and anyone lucky enough to meet him.

Our sympathy to the Whitman  family.

Sylvia Beach Whitman, George’s daughter, will continue to run the shop.

Photo and some content from BU Today.

One of the classic satirical novels of Soviet literature is  Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Mikhail Bulgakov Photo: Wikimedia Commons. This work was in the public domain in Russia according to Law No. 5351-I of Russia of July 9, 1993 (with revisions) on Copyrights and Neighbouring Rights

Copies of it made the rounds in intellectual and dissident circles despite the best efforts of the government to suppress it. Bulgakov’s play, The Days of the Turbins offered a sympathetic view of the erstwhile Russian monarchy, which also displeased officials.  Bulgakov’s request to emigrate was denied personally by Stalin in a telephone call that must have shaken the writer.  Though much of his work was banned, Bulgakov was never imprisoned and died in Moscow in 1940.

As it happens, BU Professor Katherine T. O’ Connor published a translation of The Master and Margarita in 1995 (with Diana Burgin); Ardis Publishers, Dana Point, CA.

You can read The Master and Margarita free on Google Books, http://books.google.com. It is also available at the Mugar Library.