Russian · 1891–1940
Russian novelist and playwright who wrote The Master and Margarita and couldn't publish it. Born in Kyiv, trained as a doctor, he worked as a journalist and playwright in Moscow. His satires ran afoul of Soviet censorship; Stalin protected him enough to live but not to publish. The Master and Margarita, written over twelve years, mixes Satan's visit to Moscow with the story of Pontius Pilate. It circulated in samizdat and appeared in censored form in 1966, complete only in 1973. Bulgakov died of kidney disease in 1940. The novel is now Russia's most beloved twentieth-century work.