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Portrait of Mikhail Bulgakov

Literature · Novelists

Mikhail Bulgakov

1891–1940 · Russian (born in Kyiv)

Soviet satire and fantasy

Mikhail Bulgakov trained as a doctor in Kyiv before becoming the most inventive satirist of the early Soviet period, mixing farce, the supernatural and a horror of censorship. Almost none of his best work was printed in his lifetime: his masterpiece, in which the Devil visits atheist Moscow, was written and rewritten in secret over twelve years and appeared only in the 1960s. Stalin's personal interest saved him from arrest but not from silence.

How to spot them

  • ▸A qualified doctor, from a Kyiv family; morphine addiction during his years as a country physician
  • ▸The Devil and his retinue loose in 1930s Moscow; a giant talking black cat
  • ▸"Manuscripts don't burn" — he had burned a draft himself in 1930
  • ▸Stalin telephoned him in 1930 after he wrote to the government asking to emigrate
  • ▸Patriarch's Ponds, Annushka and the spilt sunflower oil, and chapters retelling the trial of Christ

Key works

The White Guard (1925)

The Turbin family in Kyiv during the civil war of 1918–19; drawn closely from his own family

The Days of the Turbins (1926)

Stage version of The White Guard for the Moscow Art Theatre; Stalin is said to have seen it about fifteen times

Heart of a Dog (1925)

A surgeon transplants human organs into a stray dog, which becomes the odious citizen Sharikov; not published in the USSR until 1987

The Fatal Eggs (1925)

A ray that accelerates growth is misapplied, and giant reptiles advance on Moscow

A Country Doctor's Notebook (1926)

Stories of a young physician alone in a remote rural hospital, based on his own posting at Nikolskoye

The Master and Margarita (1967)

Woland and his retinue, including the cat Behemoth, wreak havoc in atheist Moscow while a parallel narrative retells the trial of Yeshua before Pontius Pilate

Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel (1965)

Unfinished satire on the Moscow Art Theatre and a thinly disguised Stanislavski

Batum (1939)

A play about the young Stalin, commissioned and then banned before it could open

Key ideas

  • Censorship as the writer's true antagonist: "manuscripts don't burn" asserts that what is written survives suppression
  • The Devil as the agent of justice in a society that denies his existence
  • Novel-within-a-novel structure, alternating Moscow farce with the austere Jerusalem chapters

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 15 May 1891 in Kyiv; he graduated in medicine from Kyiv University in 1916
  • •He gave up medicine for writing in 1920 after typhus; the story Morphine draws on his own addiction
  • •In 1930 he burned a draft of The Master and Margarita and wrote to the Soviet government asking either to be allowed to emigrate or to be given work
  • •Stalin telephoned him at home shortly afterwards, and he was given a post at the Moscow Art Theatre
  • •At the Moscow Art Theatre he worked as an adaptor, dramatising Gogol's Dead Souls in 1932, and later wrote opera libretti for the Bolshoi
  • •He died on 10 March 1940 of nephrosclerosis, the kidney disease that had killed his father
  • •His third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, preserved the manuscript and is taken as the model for Margarita
  • •The Master and Margarita was serialised in censored form in the magazine Moskva in 1966–67; the uncut text appeared abroad
  • •The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil is commonly said to have been prompted by the novel

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Sources