ABSTRACT
The story “Morphine” (“Morfii”) was published in the medical journal The Medical Worker (Meditsinskii rabotnik) in 1927.1 As witnessed by Bulgakov’s first wife, Tat’yana Lappa, and by the writer Yury Slezkin, in 1921 Bulgakov was working on a novel called “The Disease” (“Nedug”). The critics Lidiya Yanovskaya and Marietta Chudakova have both suggested that “Morphine” might be a re-working of this novel, written under the immediate impression of the tragic events unleashed on the country after 1917 and at the height of the drug addiction that afflicted the future writer in the years 1916-1919 when he was working as a doctor in the village of Nikol’skoe and the town of V’yazma.2
