Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891–1940) was born in Kiev and qualified as a physician in 1916. He served as a doctor in rural Smolensk province and during the Civil War, struggled with morphine addiction, and then abandoned medicine for writing in Moscow. His plays and satirical fiction were attacked and banned by Soviet critics. He worked on The Master and Margarita for over a decade and died of hereditary kidney disease before it was published.
written 1928–1940; published 1966–1967 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
