A Country Doctor's Notebook

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MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1891–1940) was born in Kiev, one of seven children born to a university lecturer and a teacher. Although he showed an early interest in theater and literature, he went on to study medicine at Kiev University, and in the early part of the First World War served as a doctor on the front lines. Twice wounded, he left the service and after recovering—and getting over his subsequent morphine addiction—was appointed provincial physician to Smolensk province in 1916. He detailed this experience in A Country Doctor’s Notebook, but the book went unpublished until years after his death. During the Russian Civil War he served briefly as a physician for the Ukrainian People’s Army, while most of his family emigrated to France and Germany. Bulgakov, however, was refused permission to leave. In 1919 he left medicine to write full-time, settling in Moscow and publishing works such as Heart of a Dog (1925) and The White Guard (1926). Though his work was often censored, Stalin showed his personal favor by protecting him from imprisonment and found work for him at Moscow’s Art Theater. During much of the 1930s Bulgakov worked there as a stage director, while laboring at home on his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. He finished the book in 1939 but died of a kidney disorder the following year, leaving The Master and Margarita unpublished until twenty-six years after his death.

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