Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was born in Kyiv in 1891, the eldest son of a professor of theology at the Kyiv Theological Academy. He trained as a doctor at Kyiv University, graduating in 1916, and was sent immediately into wartime medical service — first at the front, then to a remote rural posting in Smolensk province, where as a barely-trained twenty-five-year-old he was the only physician for thousands of peasants. The experience produced A Country Doctor's Notebook, drawing directly on the Smolensk months, including the morphine addiction he developed there and only narrowly escaped.

The Russian Civil War caught him in Kyiv, which changed hands fourteen times between 1918 and 1920. He was conscripted as a military doctor by several different armies, including the White forces fighting the Bolsheviks. By the time the fighting ended he had abandoned medicine for writing, supporting himself in Moscow through journalism while drafting his first novel The White Guard (1925), an unsentimental portrait of an officer family caught up in the Kyiv chaos. He adapted it for the Moscow Art Theatre as The Days of the Turbins, and the play became a peculiar kind of hit: it portrayed White officers with sympathy, which should have been impossible under the early Soviet cultural regime, but Stalin happened to like it and reportedly attended fifteen times.

That ambiguous protection became the central fact of Bulgakov's life. By the late 1920s his plays were being banned and his fiction refused publication; he wrote to the Soviet government in 1930 asking either to be allowed to emigrate or to be given work. In April 1930 his telephone rang and Stalin was on the line — a brief, oblique conversation that ended with a job at the Moscow Art Theatre and an unspoken understanding that Bulgakov would be permitted to live and work, but not to publish freely or leave the country. He spent the rest of his life inside that arrangement: tolerated, watched, occasionally employed as an adaptor and librettist, never released.

The Master and Margarita, the novel he is now best known for, was written in secret over roughly twelve years from 1928 until his death. The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a retinue including a giant talking black cat named Behemoth; meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Pontius Pilate interrogates a man called Yeshua in Roman Jerusalem; meanwhile, a writer called the Master and his lover Margarita try to recover a burned manuscript. Bulgakov destroyed an early draft in 1930 in a moment of despair, then rewrote it from memory — the line "manuscripts don't burn," spoken by Woland the Devil in the finished book, comes directly from that experience. He was still dictating revisions to his third wife Elena during his final illness.

He died of nephrosclerosis, an inherited kidney disease, in March 1940. The Master and Margarita sat in a desk drawer for twenty-six years until a heavily censored serialization appeared in Moskva in 1966–67; an uncensored Russian edition was not legally published in the USSR until 1973. Heart of a Dog (1925), a satire about a stray turned into a Soviet citizen by surgery, was banned outright and not published in Russia until 1987 — almost half a century after his death.