ABSTRACT
Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891. Although a doctor by training, he found his true vocation as a playwright and novelist. For the best part of his life, however, the writer was to be denied a voice. Bulgakov's plays failed to open and his novels, for the most part, remained unpublished. Indeed, his prose masterpiece The Master and Margarita did not appear in book form until 1973, more than 20 years after his death.
