In Russian literature there are writers who are ruled by fate and ruled by it. Mikhail Bulgakov belongs to the latter. His entire life was continuous, purposeful, doomed to a defeat in life and a brilliant victory in literature—an artistic duel with Fate. What must be done with a person like him, what gift should be given, through which rises and falls, temptations, trials, and seductions should his life’s plot be woven, what friends, enemies, and remarkable women to provide, so that he will write “The White Guard,” “Heart of a Dog,” “A Theatrical Novel,” “Run,” “The Cabal of the Hypocrites,” and “The Master and Margarita”? The prose writer, Doctor of Philology, laureate of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn literary prize, as well as the “Anti-Booker,” “Big Book,” and other awards, author of biographies of M. M. Prishvin, A. S. Green, and A. N. Tolstoy—Aleksei Varlamov—offers his own version of the writer’s fate, whose books for many decades have inspired admiration, outrage, fierce disputes, love, and doubt, yet leave few indifferent and enjoy an undeniable, steady success worldwide.