Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv in 1891, then part of the Russian Empire, and died in Moscow in 1940. He trained as a doctor and worked in country and city medical posts during the First World War and the civil war that followed, experiences that fed his early stories. He soon turned to writing and moved to Moscow in the early 1920s, where he wrote satirical sketches, novels and plays.

Under Soviet rule his work was often attacked by critics and censors, and several plays and books were banned or kept from print. He nonetheless kept writing, combining sharp comedy, fantasy and moral seriousness. His masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, was completed in his last years and appeared only long after his death. It is now counted among the finest Russian novels of the twentieth century, and he is admired for his courage and wit.