The thesis analyses the relationship between the artist and authority through the palimpsest in
Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Don Quixote and Juan Mayorga’s Love Letters to Stalin. The main
objective of the thesis is to determine how and for what purpose these two writers from different
historical periods used the palimpsest to depict the relationship between the artist and
totalitarian authority. The research is based on Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality and
Gérard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality, which defines the palimpsest as a newly created
text (hypertext) written on the basis of a previous text (hypotext). Don Quixote is based on
Cervantes’s novel, while Love Letters to Stalin is based on a collection of letters that Bulgakov
and Zamyatin sent to the Soviet government. The results of the analysis show that both works
place Mikhail Bulgakov at the forefront, which is why the writer’s autobiographical and
historical circumstances also play an important role. The study shows that both authors used
the hypotext to depict the artist’s hopeless situation within a totalitarian system that demands
the artist’s submission. Based on Cervantes’s novel, Bulgakov employed semantic transposition
to create a satire of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, in which the character of Sanson Karrasko
embodies the rational representative of authority who forces the artist to renounce his ideas and
ideals. Mayorga, on the other hand, employing postmodernist techniques—such as
fragmentation, metatheatricality, the disintegration of identity, and the indeterminacy of time
and space, transformed historical letters into a drama in which he reimagined the relationship
between the artist and the authorities as a romantic one. He presents this relationship as
something universal within any temporal and historical framework. Therefore, we can speak of
a semantic transposition in this drama as well. An analysis of both works demonstrates that the
authors have altered the meaning of the hypotext to depict the fate of an artist who refuses to
renounce his truth and artistic freedom, a stance that leads to his moral and physical death.
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