Mikhail Bulgakov

Part autobiography, part fiction, this early work by the author of The Master and Margarita shows a master at the dawn of his craft, and a nation divided by centuries of unequal progress.
In 1916 a 25-year-old, newly qualified doctor named Mikhail Bulgakov was posted to the remote Russian countryside. He brought to his position a diploma and a complete lack of field experience. And the challenges he faced didn’t end there:...

I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one...

From the author of The Master and Margarita, these semiautobiographical stories chronicle the darkly comic adventures of a physician in rural 1917 Russia. Fresh from medical school in the winter of 1917, the young Dr. Bomgard assumes the role of the only doctor in a provincial Russian hospital. Dealing with a cases ranging from the horrific to the hilarious to the surreal, Bomgard recounts his solitary time practicing medicine among the superstitious,...

Regarded as the foremost Russian translators in today's literary field, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhovsky -- together with acclaimed playwright Richard Nelson -- have created fresh interpretations of two seminal works from the acclaimed Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. The original works were charged with cultural subtext and controversial intrigue, revealed in a new light with this exceptional new volume.

In the Ukrainian capital Kiev ('the City'), life has become frightening and fragile. Bulgakov's first full-length novel is set in the harsh and chaotic winter of 1918–19, as power struggles start to play out with brutal consequences. Echoing Tolstoy's approach in War and Peace, Bulgakov contrasts the concerns of domestic life with the wide-ranging and destructive historical events; but where Tolstoy's structure is clear, Bulgakov interweaves narrative,...