u/2whitie

There are many reasons one may decide not the read Ivan Vasilievich for Bingo, chief of which are:

1. It's nearly impossible to find in English (A very helpful 2-year old comment in r/RussianLiterature kindly noted that it was one of the works collected in "Russian Satiric Comedy: Six Plays" Translated and Edited by L. Senelick. Luckily, the local library took it from there and tracked down a copy for me. Thanks, fellow nerds!
2. It's a play. Despite enjoying theatre, I've never been one to sit down and read plays outside of school. Thanks Bingo for forcing the issue?
3. The ending nearly takes it out of consideration for Bingo. After a brief crash-out, I realized that if I couldn't count Ivan, then no one could count Alice in Wonderland either. With that logic, I decided it counted, but YMMV.

But here are all the reasons you SHOULD read Ivan Vasilievich for Bingo: (And there are more of these :))

1. You get to read more Bulgakov. This sub became a pretty big fan of his a few cards ago when people read his magnum opus The Master and Margarita to fulfill the "Dreams" and "Angels and Demons" squares, and this is your chance to get him back into your Bingo rotation.
2. The plot is just fun, man. Basically, the plot is that a Soviet scientist accidently uses his newly invented time machine to swap his landlord (the eponymous Ivan Vasilievich Bunsha-Koretskiy) with the actual historical figure of Ivan the Terrible. Our scientist has a decent idea of how to fix the problem, but he has to step away from his apartment to get the key/equipment to fix the machine to do so...leaving everyone else alone to cause utter chaos in his absence. And they do.
3. It's actually funny. And not just in a high-brow literature way or a "person who is knowledgeable enough about the state of affairs in the Soviet Union to know the specifics of what exactly is being satirized" funny. There's a lot of vaudeville-style jokes that would make a person smile no matter who they were. (My favorite being the "Rock hates Mark"--eque joke where Ivan the Terrible is upset on the scientist's behalf over his wife's infidelity and the ongoing gag about Ivan's father. The temporary switch in patronymic (?) actually made me laugh.
4. There's just enough stage direction that you can easily picture it as a sort of sitcom where different characters run in and out based on who they are trying to run from at the time.
5. The dialog is very tight. Once it gets going, it gets going and there isn't much fat on the bone.
6. Ivan the Terrible's scribe is stressed. The Scribe needs an invite to the cottage.

And, okay. It isn't the most serious of his works. It doesn't have any banger quotes like "Manuscripts don't burn" or haunting religious imagery. It doesn't lampoon the USSR as hard as some of his earlier works. It takes a few pages to get going, and it needed a different ending. But it kept me, a person who doesn't really read plays, engaged the entire time. And it's always interesting to see a time-travel-comedy out of the 1930s, when it wasn't used as much, so the established tropes weren't there. Hopefully it sees a bit of a resurgence, as a bit of a screw-you to the censorship laws that prevented it's publication until the 60s.

Rating: 3.75/5

Silly Award: Book Most Likely To Make You Look Smart Before The Librarian Also Sees You Check Out Mothman is My Boyfriend

Bingo Squares: Translated Fiction (From Russian)