The Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov

The author of this book is the outstanding Russian literary scholar, Doctor of Philological Sciences Marietta Omarovna Chudakova (1937–2021). «The Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov» was published in 1988 – for the first time, the writer's biography was presented in such a sequential and comprehensive narrative. Readers were given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with archival documents, testimonies from people who surrounded the writer, fragments of his diaries and letters (which had not yet been published at that time), and most importantly, to assess the true scale of Bulgakov's personality, without censorship gloss and ideological omissions. Today it is hard to imagine the effort it took M. O. Chudakova to gather all the factual material that we have today.

To this day, this book remains the most authoritative study of Bulgakov’s biography. It has been translated into other languages, but in response to numerous requests for a reissue in Russian, M. O. Chudakova declined: she hoped to prepare a revised version of the text but did not manage to do so. Nevertheless, the current edition takes into account the author's corrections preserved in a copy from the Chudakovs' home library.

The book includes an insert with illustrations.