Mihail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was a Russian writer and playwright.

Born in 1891 into a middle-class Russian family in Kiev, he graduated in medicine from Kiev University in 1916. During the years of World War I and the Civil War he worked as a doctor in various parts of the country. After failing to emigrate, he tried to adjust to the Bolshevik regime, settling in Moscow in 1921 with the intention of pursuing a career in literature.

In the early 1920s Bulgakov published numerous feuilletons and published his first prose works, often including autobiographical elements. He became widely known in 1926 with the success in Moscow theatres of several of his plays, most notably “The Turbine Days”, which became extremely popular for its departure from the norms of dominant propaganda in its depiction of the Civil War from the perspective of the urban middle class.

After several successful years in Moscow theatre circles, Mikhail Bulgakov fell out of favour with the regime in the late 1920s, his plays were banned by the censors and many of his prose texts were not published. During this period he wrote his novel “The Master and Margarita”, published long after his death, which brought him international fame and is now considered his most important work.

Bulgakov died in Moscow in 1940, aged 48, of kidney disease.