Bliss
There are a large number of fictional works and plays using the title Bliss.
This entry discusses only those works that (may) have been performed in South Africa
Bliss by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)[]
The play has been described as a “satirical-romantic romp through history”, one that mocks the past, present, and a supposedly “ideal” future.[1] Bulgakov creates in Bliss an everyman’s story of the desire to escape the false promises of the Revolution and the inherent dangers in even thinking such thoughts. Indeed, the play, with its plotline of Ivan of the Terrible appearing in contemporary Moscow, became the basis for another Bulgakov play, Ivan Vasilievich (1936), which later became the very successful and popular Soviet film Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession (1979).[2]
Written in Russian in 1934, it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1966,
Translated into English as Bliss by Mirra Ginsburg and published in the volume Flight & Bliss in 1985, long after the author’s death and later also by Bulgakov scholar Carl R. Proffer (published in The Monkeys are Coming: Russian Drama of the 1920s. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Michael A. Green, Jerome H. Katsell, and Stanislav A. Shvabrin. Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, 2009. )
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/47319
https://dmoddylabs.medium.com/bulgakovs-play-bliss-c296effc3306
BLISS BY PETER CAREY
Based on a 1939 short story by Andrey Platonov, it is a play about the shame of war, the potential of love, and the strength of the human spirit, telling the tragi-comic tale of a young couple trying to build a life against the odds in the aftermath of the Russian civil war.
