Revision as of 02:11, 5 February 2003

Mikhail Bulgakov (May 15, 1891 - March 10, 1940), was a Ukrainian-born Soviet novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century.

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, the oldest son of a university professor. Even during his life, Bulgakov was famous for his books Notes of a Country Doctor and White Guard. He was, for a short period, Stalin's favorite playwright. Stalin was fond of the play Days of the Turbins, which was based on White Guard. Stalin's favor won him a job as a literary bureaucrat, but Bulgakov's writings, including White Guard, were banned in 1929, and Stalin refused Bulgakov's request for permission to emigrate.

However it is the fantasy/morality novel The Master and Margarita, published almost thirty years after his death, in 1967, that has granted him immortality. Nonetheless, the book was available, samizdat, for many years in the Soviet Union, before the serialization of a censored version in the journal Moskva. In the opinion of many, The Master and Margarita is the best Russian novel of the century and the best of the Soviet novels, although it is difficult to imagine Joseph Stalin approving the novel. The novel spawned a phrase that has seeped into post-Soviet Russian lexicon: "Manuscripts don't burn." A destroyed manuscript is an important plot element, and, in real life, Bulgakov had to rewrite the novel from memory after the first manuscript was lost.

The Bulgakov sons enlisted in the White Army, and in post-Civil War Russia, ended up in Paris, save for Mikhail. Mikhail Bulgakov, who enlisted as a field doctor, ended up in the Caucasus, where he geventually began working as a journalist. Despite his relatively favored status under Stalin's Soviet regime, Bulgakov was prevented from either emigrating or visiting his brothers in the West.

In 1913 Bulgakov married Tatyana Lappa. In 1916, Bulgakov graduated from the Medical School of Kiev University. In 1921, he moved with Tatyana to Moscow. Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Liubov' Belozerskaia. In 1932, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Elena Shilovskaia. During this last decade of his life, along with The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov occupied himself extensively with adapting various novels for the stage.

After his death on the 10th of March, 1940, Mikhail Bulgakov was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

Various authors and musicians have credited The Master and Margarita as inspiration for certain works. Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, for example, clearly was influenced by Bulgakov's masterwork. The Rolling Stones have said the novel was key in their song, "Sympathy for the Devil". The grunge band Pearl Jam were influenced by the novel's confrontation between Yeshua Ha-Notsri, that is, Jesus, and Pontius Pilate for their 1998 song, "Pilate".

Works

• Notes on Cuffs
• Notes of a Country Doctor
• Days of the Turbins (play)
• The Cabal of Hypocrites (play)
• Pushkin (The Last Days) (play)
• Batum (play)
• White Guard
• Fatal Eggs
• Heart of a Dog
• Master and Margarita

External Links=

Bulgakov's letter to the Soviet government