Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was a Russian author. His works include The Master and Margarita (1967) and The Heart of a Dog (1968).[1]

## Contents

* 1 Life and Works
* 2 See also
* 3 References
* 4 External links

## Life and Works[edit]

Mikhail Afanashevich Bulgakov was born May 15 (Gregorian Calendar), 1891 in Kiev, Russia, the oldest of the five sons of Afanasiy Bulgakov, assistant professor at the Kiev Theological Academy.[2] In 1913, he married Tatiana Nikolaevna Lappa or "Tasla," a finance minister's daughter; and in 1916, he graduated from St. Vladimir University in Kiev as a medical student and began working at many hospitals in Kiev.[3]

He gave up medicine for writing, first as a journalist after his working as an army doctor in a counterterrorist group.[2] After journalism, he wrote Belaya Gvardiya, or The White Guard, about a group of Anti-Bolshevik White Guards, which was realistic and easily empathized with and thus criticized by the Communist government.[4] He reworked it into a play, Dni Turbinykh, which was banned, and then wrote Dyavoliada and Sobachye serdtse ("Heart of a Dog"), criticisms of communism and pseudoscience respectively.[4] Dyavoliada he also remade as a play, Diabolidad, before his acquaintance with H.G. Wells and writing the science fiction works The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog.[2] In 1930, he was officially an enemy of the government, though Josef Stalin, while rejecting his immigration plea, employed him at a local theater, where he wrote some of his greatest works as a playwright, including Molière, upon the death of Molière, Teatralny roman or Black Snow, an autobiography, and his greatest work, The Master and Margarita.[4] As a retelling of the Gospels told as a criticism of communism in an atheist Russia, it seems as an excellent conservative work, and is an fantastic tragedy resembling Gogol, but is said to be scathing and ribald.[2][4]

His subsequent plays include The Cabal of Hypocrites and Pushkin (The Last Days), after the banishment of which he began to write librettos for the Bolshoi Ballet. He had married three times before dying of a kidney failure on March 10, 1940.[5]

## See also[edit]

* Nikolai Gogol

## References[edit]

1. ↑ The New York Public Library Student's Desk Reference. Prentice Hall: New York, 1991.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-bulgakov/
3. ↑ http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/01bulgakov/biografie.html
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 "Bulgakov, Mikhail." Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
5. ↑ https://www.loc.gov/rr/european/bulgaklc.html

## External links[edit]

* Extensive Biography from the Library of Congress