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.
