His story "Heart of a Dog" (1925) is a bitter satire about the loss of civilized values in Russia under the Soviet system. Bulgakov's plays at the Moscow Art Theatre were directed by Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.īugakov's own way of life and his witty criticism of the ugly realities of life in the Soviet Union caused him much trouble. Later, he met Mikhail Zoschenko, Anna Akhmatova, Viktor Ardov, Sergei Mikhalkov, and Kornei Chukovsky. There he became a writer and became friends with Valentin Katayev, Yuri Olesha, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeni Petrov, and Konstantin Paustovsky. He provided medical help to the Chehchens, Caucasians, Cossacs, Russians, the Whites, and the Reds. Several times he was almost killed by opposing forces on both sides of the Russian Civil War, but soldiers needed doctors, so Bulgakov was left alive. After the Civil War, he tried (unsuccesfully) to emigrate from Russia to reunite with his brother in Paris. He joined the anti-communist White Army during the Russian Civil War. He practiced medicine, specializing in venereal and other infectious diseases, from 1915 to 1919 (he later wrote about the experience in "Notes of a Young Doctor.") He married his classmate Tatiana Lappa, who became his assistant at surgeries and in his doctor's office. Bulgakov later graduated with honors from the Medical School of Kyiv University in 1915. Bulgakov and his brothers took part in the demonstration commemorating the death of Leo Tolstoy. His family belonged to the intellectual elite of Kyiv. Mikhaíl Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков) was the first of six children in the family of a theology professor. Fame, at home and abroad, was not to come until a quarter of a century after his death in Moscow in 1940. He also wrote a brilliant biography, highly original in form, of his literary hero, Molière, but The Master and Margarita, a fantasy novel about the devil and his henchmen set in modern Moscow, is generally considered his masterpiece. His later works treat the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical characters, with plays such as Molière, staged in 1936, Don Quixote, staged in 1940, and Pushkin, staged in 1943. His sympathetic portrayal of White characters in his stories, in the plays The Days of the Turbins (The White Guard), which enjoyed great success at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926, and Flight (1927), and his satirical treatment of the officials of the New Economic Plan, led to growing criticism, which became violent after the play, The Purple Island. He studied and briefly practised medicine and, after indigent wanderings through revolutionary Russia and the Caucasus, he settled in Moscow in 1921. Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, Russian Empire (today part of modern Ukraine) on 3/. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.Īn audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature.
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