Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasyevich (1891-1940)

Russian novelist and playwright. His novel The White Guard (1924), dramatized as The Days of the Turbins (1926), dealt with the Revolution and the civil war. His satiric approach made him unpopular with the Stalin regime, and he was unpublished from the 1930s. He is most famous internationally for his novel The Master and Margarita (1967), a fantasy about the devil appearing in Moscow.

Other plays include Zoe's Apartment (1926), The Crimson Island (1928; which makes fun of censorship), Flight (1928; about White exiles), and A Cabal of Hypocrites (1936; so altered by Stanislavsky that Bulgakov left the Moscow Art Theatre). Other books include The Heart of a Dog (1925; in which a doctor turns a dog into a humanoid), and Black Snow (1965; a portrait of Stanislavsky as a tyrant).