Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov (1891–1940) is an outstanding Russian writer and playwright who gained worldwide fame at the end of the 20th century. Probably, today there is no person who hasn’t heard of his famous novel “The Master and Margarita.” A brilliant satirist and unsurpassed essayist, he wrote “Fatal Eggs” and “A Dog’s Heart,” and created a panorama of Moscow in the 1920s. Bulgakov’s main interest always remained the human being living in an irreversibly changing world. By nature sarcastic and sharp, Bulgakov put before readers the same questions again and again: how firmly does human nobility stand? Can an intellectual withstand the pressure of militant grayness, ignorance, baseness, and rudeness? Can crude aggression and ruthless power crush a person—or is it that forces that help one stand up in the struggle against evil govern the world? “Manuscripts don’t burn,” and time has no power over works created by a master with a pure soul and wise heart. And the farther away from us the dates of Bulgakov’s works recede in time, the stronger grows the interest of readers and viewers in them.