Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков; 15 May 1891 – 10 March 1940) was a Russian, later Soviet writer, medical doctor, and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century.
He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born on 15 May 1891 in Kiev, Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a Russian family.
He was one of the seven children (the oldest of three brothers) of Afanasiy Bulgakov – a state councilor, a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, as well as a prominent Russian Orthodox essayist, thinker and translator of religious texts.
His mother was Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakova (nee Pokrovskaya), a former teacher.
Both of his grandfathers were clergymen in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Afanasiy Bulgakov was born in Bryansk Oblast, Russia, where his father was a priest, and he moved to Kiev to study in the academy.
Varvara Bulgakova was born in Karachev, Russia.
According to Edythe C. Haber, in his "autobiographical remarks" Bulgakov stated that she was a descendant of Tartar hordes, which supposedly influenced some of his works.
From childhood, Bulgakov was drawn to theater.
At home, he wrote comedies, which his brothers and sisters acted out.
1901
In 1901, Bulgakov joined the First Kiev Gymnasium, where he developed an interest in Russian and European literature (his favourite authors at the time being Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dickens), theatre and opera.
The teachers of the Gymnasium exerted a great influence on the formation of his literary taste.
1907
After the death of his father in 1907, Mikhail's mother, a well-educated and extraordinarily diligent person, assumed responsibility for his education.
1909
After graduation from the Gymnasium in 1909, Bulgakov entered the Medical Faculty of Kiev University.
1913
In 1913, Bulgakov married Tatiana Lappa.
Bulgakov was staying with Lappa's parents in Saratov at the outbreak of the First World War.
He returned to Kiev and volunteered for the Red Cross, after which he then took a position as an undergraduate physician at hospital in Chernovtsy.
After passing medical exams with special commendation, he was sent to frontline field hospitals in western Ukraine.
1916
In 1916 he was transferred to the village of Nikolskoye in the Smolensk Oblast.
1917
In 1917 he was transferred to the village of Vyazma, but later left for Moscow in an unsuccessful attempt to gain a military discharge, and also possibly to seek clinical help for his addiction.
1918
After briefly visiting Lappa's parents in Saratov, they returned to Kiev in February 1918.
Upon returning Bulgakov opened a private practice at his home at Andreyevsky Descent, 13.
Here he lived through the Civil War and witnessed ten coups.
Successive governments drafted the young doctor into their service while two of his brothers were serving in the White Army against the Bolsheviks.
1919
In February 1919, he was mobilised as an army physician by the White Army and assigned to the Northern Caucasus.
There, he became seriously ill with typhus and barely survived.
In the Caucasus, he started working as a journalist, but when he and others were invited to return as doctors by the French and German governments, Bulgakov was refused permission to leave Russia because of the typhus.
That was when he last saw his family; after the Civil War and the rise of the Soviets most of his relatives emigrated to Paris.
After his illness, Bulgakov abandoned his medical practice to pursue writing.
In his autobiography, he recalled how he began: "Once in 1919 when I was traveling at night by train I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story".
His first book was an almanac of feuilletons called Future Perspectives, written and published the same year.
In December 1919, Bulgakov moved to Vladikavkaz.
1920
He is also known for his novel The White Guard; his plays Ivan Vasilievich, Flight (also called The Run), and The Days of the Turbins; and other works of the 1920s and 1930s.
He wrote mostly about the horrors of the Russian Civil War and about the fate of Russian intellectuals and officers of the Tsarist Army caught up in revolution and Civil War.
1922
Some of his works (Flight, all his works between the years 1922 and 1926, and others) were banned by the Soviet government, and personally by Joseph Stalin, after it was decided by them that they "glorified emigration and White generals".
On the other hand, Stalin loved The Days of the Turbins (also called The Turbin Brothers) very much and reportedly saw it at least 15 times.
1925
Bulgakov wrote short stories based on his experience working there, which would be published separately in 1925–1926 when he was already an established writer, and later collected and republished into a short story cycle entitled A Young Doctor's Notebook.
The most known story, Morphine, is based on the author's actual addiction to morphine, which he started taking to alleviate the allergic effects of an anti-diphtheria drug, after accidentally infecting himself with the disease while treating a child with the same condition.
While visiting Kiev with his wife, they received advice from Bulgakov's stepfather on countering his addiction in the form of injecting distilled water instead of morphine, which gradually helped Bulgakov to end his addiction.
