Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and John Hamm (Don Draper) to star in a British series based on autobiographical notes of Mikhail Bulgakov.
The subject of some of my ramblings—Mikhail Bulgakov and his novel Master and Margarita—may become a little less obscure soon. A friend pointed me to a slate.com article about a British TV series premiering next month, called A Country Doctor’s Notebook, based on a collection of short stories of the same name by Bulgakov. These stories are partly biographical as Bulgakov was himself a doctor, and served in a rural Russian district after graduating from medical school just a few years before the outbreak of W.W.I
Radcliffe will play a younger version and Hamm an older version of the same character—Vladimir Bomgard, though evidently they will occasionally share scenes and converse with each other; the elder Blomgard presumably giving adice to (or laughing at) his younger self.
The idea for this series was apparently Hamm’s, who is described as being somewhat obsessed with Bulgakov’s book. And Radcliffe apparently took an interest as he is, according to Slate, “also a Bulgakov fan”.
There is not a planned release date for airing in the U.S. yet. But I will be interested in seeing it at the earliest opportunity, mainly to see how they depict Russia on the eve of Revolution (assuming it is even set in Russia).
On a similar note, I’ve found a mini-series, produced in Russia in 2005, of Master and Margarita. So far as I’ve watched, it stays remarkably true to the book, though in a kind of mechanical way, and it also does a good job of evoking Moscow in the interwar period (down to the sepia tone added to the scenes). For those who don’t understand Russian, I have not yet found a dubbed or subtitled version yet, save for some snippets on YouTube