Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891. In 1909, he entered the Faculty of Medicine and from 1916 worked as a doctor in a village in the Smolensk province; he then moved to the city of Vyazma. The impressions of those years served as the basis for the cycle of stories A Young Doctor's Notebook (1925-1926). After the October Revolution of 1917, Bulgakov returned to Kiev. During the Civil War, he lived for a time in Vladikavkaz and in 1921 moved to Moscow, where the action of The Fatal Eggs (1925) and Heart of a Dog (1925, published in 1968 in Great Britain) takes place. In 1925, he published in the magazine Russia and the novel The White Guard. That same year, he began working on a play linked in argument and theme to the latter, which would later be named The Days of the Turbins (1926). The creation process of this play is described in Notes of a Dead Man, published posthumously as Black Snow (1965). Later, he wrote two satirical works about Soviet life in the twenties, Zoya's Apartment (1926) and The Purple Island (1927), as well as a drama about the Civil War and the first Russian emigration, Flight (1928, banned shortly after its premiere).
In the late 1920s, Bulgakov was subjected to harsh attacks by the official critics. His prose works were not published, and his plays were removed from the theater repertoire. In March 1930, he sent a letter to Stalin and the Soviet government requesting the possibility to emigrate from the Soviet Union or, alternatively, to make a living in the theater. A month later, Stalin called Bulgakov and allowed him to work, after which the writer received the position of assistant director at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Bulgakov died in Moscow on March 10, 1940.
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