Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine—then part of the Russian Empire—to an elite Russian family of Orthodox clergymen and scholars. His father died in his youth, but his diligent mother, a teacher, oversaw his education and cultivated his early interest in literature. He went on to study medicine at Kiev University, then work at the Kiev Military Hospital and serve as a Red Cross physician during World War I. After the war, he became a surgeon and then began working as a country doctor in rural Smolensk province. He spent his free time writing short stories, which he eventually published in the collection A Country Doctor’s Notebook. Bulgakov eventually returned to Ukraine, then treated patients throughout Russia during the Russian Civil War. In the war, his brothers joined the White Army and fought against the Bolsheviks, and afterward, most of his family moved to Paris. But because of a serious typhus infection, Bulgakov wasn’t allowed to leave. Instead, he moved to Moscow, quit medicine, and decided to become a writer. He managed to find work writing science fiction satire for local newspapers, and in the early 1920s, he wrote several plays and novellas like Heart of the Dog. However, the Soviet government wouldn’t let most of them get produced or published because they were critical of the Bolsheviks. Among others, the government made an exception for The Days of the Turbins, which ran from 1926 to 1929 and was actually one of Stalin’s favorite works. But when the government definitively shut down Bulgakov’s career in 1929, Bulgakov wrote a letter to Stalin asking for permission to leave Russia. Stalin called him on the phone and allowed him to work in the Moscow Art Theater as a stage director. From the early 1930s until the end of his life, he worked in various theaters but primarily dedicated himself to writing and revising The Master and Margarita, his last and most famous novel. While other writers were arrested, killed, or forced into exile, Bulgakov managed to survive because Stalin was a fan of his early work. But he also wasn’t allowed to publish anything, which was a constant source of frustration to him. He finished The Master and Margarita less than a year before his death from kidney disease. Most of his work wasn’t officially published until decades after his death, when the Soviet Union eased its censorship policies in the 1960s.