[8] He was the oldest of the seven children of Afanasiy Bulgakov [ru] – a state councilor, a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, as well as a prominent Russian Orthodox essayist, thinker and translator of religious texts.

[20][21] In 1901, Bulgakov joined the First Kiev Gymnasium, where he developed an interest in Russian and European literature (his favourite authors at the time being Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Dickens), theatre and opera.

Lappa, who lived in Saratov, had arrived in Kiev to visit her relatives; her aunt was a friend of Varvara Bulgakova and thus introduced her to the young Bulgakov.

[34]: 22–25 In the autumn of 1917 he was transferred to the town of Vyazma, but left for Moscow in either November or December of that year in an unsuccessful attempt to gain a military discharge.

[32][41] In the Caucasus, he started working as a journalist, but when he and others were invited to return as doctors by the French and German governments, Bulgakov was refused permission to leave Russia because of the typhus.

[42][43] According to his first wife, he first began to consistently write in Vyazma, where at nights he would work on a story called The Green Serpent (Russian: Зеленый змий).

It was difficult to find work in the capital, but he was appointed secretary to the literary section of Glavpolitprosvet (Central Committee of the Republic for Political Education).

[32] In September 1921, Bulgakov and his wife settled near Patriarch's Ponds, on Bolshaya Sadovaya street, 10 (now close to Mayakovskaya metro station).

To make a living, he started working as a correspondent and feuilletons writer for the newspapers Gudok, Krasnaia Panorama and Nakanune, based in Berlin.

[32] For the almanac Nedra, he wrote Diaboliad, The Fatal Eggs (1924), and Heart of a Dog (1925), works that combined bitter satire and elements of science fiction and were concerned with the fate of a scientist and the misuse of his discovery.

[22] The Run, treating the horrors of a fratricidal war, was personally banned by Joseph Stalin after the Glavrepertkom (Department of Repertoire) decided that it "glorified emigration and White generals".

Bulgakov's first major work was the novel The White Guard (Belaya gvardiya [Белая гвардия]), serialized in 1925 but never published in book form.

[46] On 5 October 1926, The Days of the Turbins, the play which continued the theme of The White Guard (the fate of Russian intellectuals and officers of the Tsarist Army caught up in revolution and Civil war) was premiered at the MAT.

[6][7] His plays Ivan Vasilievich (Иван Васильевич), Don Quixote (Дон Кихот) and Last Days (Последние дни [Poslednie Dni], also called Pushkin) were banned.

The premier of another, Moliėre (also known as The Cabal of Hypocrites), about the French dramatist in which Bulgakov plunged "into fairy Paris of the XVII century", received bad reviews in Pravda and the play was withdrawn from the theater repertoire.

[32] In 1928, Zoyka's Apartment and The Purple Island were staged in Moscow; both comedies were accepted by the public with great enthusiasm, but critics again gave them bad reviews.

The refusal of the authorities to let him work in the theatre and his desire to see his family who were living abroad, whom he had not seen for many years, led him to seek drastic measures[clarification needed].

When his last play Batum (1939), a complimentary portrayal of Stalin's early revolutionary days,[48] was banned before rehearsals, Bulgakov requested permission to leave the country but was refused.

The years 1937 to 1939 were stressful for Bulgakov, veering from glimpses of optimism, believing the publication of his masterpiece could still be possible, to bouts of depression, when he felt as if there were no hope.

My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest..."In 1939, Bulgakov organized a private reading of The Master and Margarita to his close circle of friends.

P. (P. A. Markov, in charge of the literature division of MAT) later at the door fearfully tried to explain to me that trying to publish the novel would cause terrible things", she wrote in her diary (14 May 1939).

In the mid-1920s, he came to admire the works of Alexander Belyaev and H. G. Wells and wrote several stories and novellas with elements of science fiction, notably The Fatal Eggs (Роковые яйца) (1924) and Heart of a Dog (Собачье сердце) (1925).

At the time, an illness passes through the chickens of Moscow, killing most of them, and to remedy the situation, the Soviet government puts the ray into use at a farm.

In 1988, an award-winning film version Sobachye Serdtse was produced by Lenfilm, starring Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev, Roman Kartsev and Vladimir Tolokonnikov.

It is a frame narrative involving two characteristically related time periods, or plot lines: a retelling in Bulgakov's interpretation of the New Testament and a description of contemporary Moscow.

The novel begins with Satan visiting Moscow in the 1930s, joining a conversation between a critic and a poet debating the most effective method of denying the existence of Jesus Christ.

Bulgakov had to rewrite the novel from memory after he burned the draft manuscript in 1930, as he could not see a future as a writer in the Soviet Union at a time of widespread political repression.

Since the 1980s, the building has become a gathering spot for Bulgakov's fans, as well as Moscow-based Satanist groups, and had various kinds of graffiti scrawled on the walls.

Various poetic and literary events are often held, and excursions to Bulgakov's Moscow are organised, some of which are animated with living characters of The Master and Margarita.

After graduating from the Medical School in 1909, he spent the early days of his career as a venereologist, rather than pursuing his goal of being a pediatrician, as syphilis was highly prevalent during those times.