Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was born on May 15, 1891, in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire, the eldest of seven children of a theology professor. He studied and practiced medicine before abandoning it entirely in 1920 to devote himself to writing, a decision made when the possibilities for Soviet literary freedom still seemed briefly open. He moved to Moscow in 1921, working as a journalist while pursuing his literary ambitions. His semi-autobiographical novel The White Guard (1924), about a Tsarist officer family during the Civil War, established him as a significant writer, though his political position was already complicated by his apparent sympathy for the losing side.
By the late 1920s the tightening of Soviet cultural policy had made his position untenable. His plays were banned, his fiction suppressed, and in 1930 he wrote directly to Stalin requesting permission to emigrate or useful work. Stalin telephoned him personally, and Bulgakov was given a position at the Moscow Art Theatre. He continued writing in secret, knowing most of what he produced could not be published in his lifetime. His masterwork was written entirely under these conditions of suppression, revised repeatedly across a decade, and withheld until after his death.
The Master and Margarita, written between 1930 and 1940 and published in censored form only in 1966, is a novel of extraordinary richness and daring. It weaves together two narratives: a retelling of Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Yeshua in ancient Jerusalem, and the visit of the Devil — in the form of Professor Woland — to Stalin’s Moscow, where his retinue of supernatural assistants wreaks havoc on corrupt bureaucrats and literary apparatchiks. A third strand follows the Master, a novelist who has written about Pilate, and his devoted Margarita. The novel is simultaneously a savage satire of Soviet life, a philosophical meditation on good and evil, and a profound love story.
Bulgakov’s prose is extraordinary for its tonal range, moving between broad comic farce and passages of lyrical beauty and philosophical depth with complete assurance. The chaos Woland’s retinue causes at a theatrical performance is among the funniest writing in Russian literature; the Jerusalem sequences are among the most gravely beautiful. This tonal mastery — the ability to hold comedy and tragedy in the same sentence — is central to what makes the novel a masterpiece.
Mikhail Bulgakov died on March 10, 1940, never knowing whether his great novel would survive. His wife Elena preserved the manuscripts through decades of danger, and the complete text was published in 1973. It has since been recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature, a triumph of artistic imagination over the forces that sought to extinguish it.