Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (born in Kiev, 1891 - died in Moscow, 1940) was a novelist, playwright and physician who wrote in Russian. Born in the Russian Empire, he worked under the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century, a period of revolution, civil war and Stalin's rule. He is best known today for The Master and Margarita, a novel published after his death that is now considered one of the great works of the twentieth century.

He was the eldest of seven children. His father, Afanasy, taught at the Kiev Theological Academy and translated religious texts; his mother, Varvara, had been a teacher. As a boy he was drawn to theatre and opera, and he and his siblings staged comedies at home. At school he read Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Dickens. According to his sister Nadezhda, his father's death in 1907 led him away from the Orthodox faith.

He studied medicine at Kiev University and graduated in 1916. That same period he worked as a rural doctor in villages in the Smolensk region, an experience that fed his stories about a young doctor's first years in practice. During the First World War he served as a doctor, and it was then that he began taking morphine to ease his pain. He managed to stop in 1918, and that episode appears bluntly in his story Morphine.

During the civil war he served as a physician with the White Army and caught typhus in the Caucasus. In 1920 he gave up medicine to write full time. After trying to emigrate, he settled in Moscow in 1921, in very precarious circumstances. To earn a living he worked as a journalist and feuilleton writer. His first book was an almanac of feuilletons, Future Perspectives.

His novel The White Guard appeared in serial form in 1925. Its stage version, The Days of the Turbins, opened in 1926 and was popular with audiences, though official critics attacked it on ideological grounds. His later plays ran into censorship, and from the late 1920s his career steadily declined. In 1930 he wrote to Stalin asking for permission to leave the country. The leader telephoned him, and by Bulgakov's own account he only replied that a writer cannot live far from his homeland. Soon afterwards Stalin found him work at the Moscow Art Theatre, where he endured years of pressure from the political police.

In his final years he worked on The Master and Margarita, which remained unfinished during his lifetime and was not published until 1966-67. Much of his writing stayed in desk drawers for decades. Since then his work has been reassessed, and he is now widely regarded as one of the great Russian prose writers of the twentieth century. His name is tied to the image of a writer who kept working under censorship.