Mikhail Bulgakov

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938, he described 327 manuscript pages, roughly 22 chapters, waiting on his desk. He called the novel something that "truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest." He was right that it would be hidden. He was wrong that it would stay there.

  Bulgakov died on the 10th of March 1940, from the same inherited kidney disease that had killed his father. His widow preserved the manuscript. It took another twenty-six years before the novel reached readers. When The Master and Margarita finally appeared in 1966, it set off a reassessment that turned a banned, obscure playwright into one of the defining voices of the 20th century.

  How does a writer produce a masterpiece under a system bent on silencing him? What was the personal cost of living inside a state that could ban your work, threaten your freedom, and yet also, inexplicably, keep you alive? And who was the man behind that survival: a doctor, a morphine addict, a pianist who loved opera, a satirist who laughed at power even when power was listening?

• 2. Childhood in Kiev

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  Bulgakov was born in Kiev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, at 28 Vozdvishenskaya Street, the oldest of seven children. His father, Afanasiy Bulgakov, was a state councilor and professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, as well as a translator of religious texts. His mother, Varvara, had been a teacher at a women's gymnasium before marriage.

  The household was intellectually alive. The children read Russian and European classics, studied music, and attended concerts. Bulgakov played piano, sang baritone, and developed a particular passion for opera. His sister Nadezhda later recalled that he attended Gounod's Faust at least 40 times. At home, the siblings staged plays they admired. The family also kept a dacha in Bucha.

  By 1901 he was enrolled in a gymnasium where his literary taste sharpened under the guidance of his teachers. His favourite authors at the time included Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dickens. Then, in 1907, his father died of malignant nephrosclerosis. The loss pushed Bulgakov away from the Orthodox faith of his upbringing and toward what his sister described as "non-belief" and an intense interest in Darwin's theories. Two years later, in the summer of 1908, he met Tatyana Lappa, who had come to Kiev from Saratov to visit relatives. She would become his first wife.

• 3. Doctor, Addict, Witness

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  Bulgakov enrolled in medicine at Kiev University in 1909 and graduated in 1916, during the First World War. He and Tatyana volunteered immediately: he as a doctor, she as a nurse. He worked first in Kamianets-Podilskyi, then in Chernivtsi, then in September of that year was transferred to Moscow, and from there to the village of Nikolskoye in the Smolensk Oblast.

  While treating a child with diphtheria, Bulgakov accidentally infected himself with the disease. To counter its allergic effects, he began injecting morphine. The addiction that followed is described in unflinching detail in his short story Morphine, a work directly drawn from his own experience. He eventually overcame the dependence through a method his stepfather suggested: substituting injections of distilled water for morphine. The story was published only once during his lifetime, in 1927.

  In 1917 he was transferred to Vyazma, left for Moscow, and then returned to Kiev in February 1918. Back in the city he had grown up in, Bulgakov opened a private practice at 13 Andreyevsky Descent and witnessed ten successive coups as different governments vied for control during the Civil War. Each government drafted him into medical service. Two of his brothers were fighting for the White Army against the Bolsheviks. In September 1919, while stationed in Grozny with his wife, he watched fighting between Anton Denikin's forces and Uzun-Hajji's forces in Chechen-Aul. He came down with typhus and was bedridden for several weeks. Around the same time, both his brothers Nikolai and Ivan emigrated; Bulgakov never saw them again.

• 4. Writing Begins

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  As early as 1912 or 1913, Bulgakov told his sister Nadezhda that he intended to be a writer. He showed her his first attempt at a story called The Fiery Serpent, about an alcoholic who dies in delirium tremens. His first wife recalled that he began writing consistently in Vyazma, working at night on a story called The Green Serpent.

  He formally abandoned medicine for writing in early 1920, in Vladikavkaz. His first publication was an almanac of feuilletons called Future Perspectives. In 1921 he tried to emigrate to the West, reaching the city of Batum before the attempt failed. He then moved to Moscow, arriving in September of that year, three weeks after his wife. He found work as a feuilleton writer for the newspapers Gudok and Nakanune. In 1923 he completed Diaboliad.

  The death of his mother from typhus on the 1st of February 1922 shaped the novel he was developing. The White Guard, completed in 1924, draws on the family's experience during the Civil War in Kiev. Bulgakov dedicated the work to his second wife, Lyubov Belozerskaya, whom he married in April 1925 after divorcing Lappa. The White Guard began serialization the same year. It caught the attention of the Moscow Art Theatre, which invited him in April 1925 to adapt it for the stage. The adaptation, The Days of the Turbins, premiered in October 1926.

• 5. Stalin in the Audience

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  The Days of the Turbins was a success with audiences, but the plays Bulgakov wrote attracted hostility from critics and, increasingly, from Soviet cultural organs. His plays were popular; official approval was another matter entirely.

  Bulgakov completed Flight in 1928, intending it for the Moscow Art Theatre. Glavrepertkom, the censorship body responsible for approving theatrical works, published a resolution on the 9th of May declaring the play had been written to glorify emigration and White Army generals. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko tried to save it by organizing a reading on the 9th of October, inviting Maxim Gorky and members of the arts administration. Gorky and most of those present were impressed. Nemirovich-Danchenko began rehearsals the next day, with actors including Nikolai Khmelyov, Viktor Stanitsyn, Alla Tarasova, and Mark Prudkin. But Glavrepertkom showed the play to Stalin, who agreed it should be banned. Flight was not staged again until 1957.

  Yet Stalin's relationship with Bulgakov was not simple condemnation. The Soviet leader reportedly attended The Days of the Turbins at least 15 times and, even after Bulgakov fell from favor, reportedly called the theatre directly to demand the play continue its production. When Bulgakov's play The Cabal of Hypocrites was banned in March 1930 and Bulgakov wrote to Stalin personally in despair, Stalin phoned him directly on the 18th of April. He asked Bulgakov whether he truly wanted to leave the Soviet Union. Bulgakov replied that he did not want to leave his homeland. Stalin told him to apply for a position as a director at the Moscow Art Theatre. By May 1930, Bulgakov held that position. The Cabal of Hypocrites was permitted to be staged, under the title Molière, in October 1931.

• 6. The Works Between the Lines

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  Even as his theatrical career lurched between tolerance and suppression, Bulgakov built a body of prose fiction that Soviet publishers would not print for decades. Heart of a Dog, written in 1925, features a professor who implants human testicles and a pituitary gland into a dog named Sharik. The dog gradually becomes more human, producing chaos. The story can be read as a satire of communist ideology; one character, the drunkard whose organs are implanted, is named Chugunkin, which critics have read as a parody of Stalin's name, since "stal'" means steel. The story was adapted into a comic opera called The Murder of Comrade Sharik by William Bergsma in 1973, and in 1988 an award-winning Soviet film version was produced by Lenfilm, starring Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev, Roman Kartsev, and Vladimir Tolokonnikov.

  The Fatal Eggs, written in 1924, tells of Professor Persikov, who discovers a red ray that accelerates growth in living organisms. A bureaucratic mix-up sends snake and crocodile eggs to a farm instead of chicken eggs; giant creatures emerge and devastate the suburbs of Moscow. The propaganda machine distorts the professor's reputation in the aftermath, just as it distorted real scientists under Soviet rule. It was this story that earned Bulgakov the label of counter-revolutionary.

  His medical years also produced A Young Doctor's Notebook, based on his time as a country doctor in 1916-1918. He intended the stories to appear in a single collection, but the book was not published until 1963. His prose remained unprinted from the late 1920s to 1961.

• 7. The Sunset Novel

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  Bulgakov began working on The Master and Margarita in either 1928 or 1929. In 1930, he burned the first draft. At that point the novel had no Master and no Margarita; it was titled "The Engineer's Hoof." He rewrote it from memory, working through the 1930s while his plays were banned, while his prose sat unpublished, and while Stalin's favor protected him from arrest without granting him the right to be read.

  In 1939, when his play Batum, a portrait of Stalin's early revolutionary years, was banned before rehearsals even began, Bulgakov requested permission to leave the country. The request was refused. His eyesight was failing. He dictated revisions to his wife Elena, who had been with him since 1929. The years 1937 to 1939 swung between glimpses of hope and periods of depression about whether publication was possible.

  In 1939 he organized a private reading of the novel for a close circle of friends. Elena Bulgakova recalled the moment in her diary entry of the 14th of May 1939: after the reading ended, Bulgakov said he was taking the novel to the publisher the next morning. No one spoke. She wrote that everyone "sat paralyzed," and that P. A. Markov, head of the literature division of the Moscow Art Theatre, whispered at the door that trying to publish the novel would "cause terrible things."

  Bulgakov died on the 10th of March 1940. A civil funeral was held on the 11th of March at the Union of Soviet Writers. The Moscow sculptor Sergey Merkurov cast a death mask before the funeral. Bulgakov was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. Elena Bulgakova preserved the manuscript for twenty-six years. In 1966, it was finally published. The novel contributed phrases to the Russian language, including "Manuscripts don't burn" and "second-grade freshness." Salman Rushdie named it as an inspiration for The Satanic Verses, and Mick Jagger cited it as part of the inspiration for The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil."