Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in
1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to write some of the greatest Russian literature of this
century. After a lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime he died impoverished and
blind in 1940 shortly after completing his masterpiece The Master and Margarita. None of his
major fiction was published during his lifetime.
