Through his surreal, often grotesque humour, Bulgakov creates in this book - a new translation of one of the most popular satires on the Russian Revolution and on Soviet society - an ingenious new twist to the 'Frankenstein' parable. Having been scalded by boiling water earlier that day, and with little chance to survive the severe winter night, a stray dog is left for dead on the streets. Lamenting his fate, he is ill prepared for the chance arrival of a wealthy professor who befriends him and takes him home. However, it seems the professor's motives are not entirely altruistic - an expert in medical experimentation, he sees his new charge as the potential subject for a bizarre operation, and implants glands from a dead criminal in the dog. The resulting half-man, half-beast is, as to be expected, a monstrosity, yet one that fits in remarkably well with Soviet society...

In this collection of short stories, drawing heavily from the author's own experiences as a medical graduate on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov describes a young doctor's turbulent and often brutal introduction to his practice in the backward village of Muryovo. Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection contains some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress.

Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend's aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov's uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction - his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

An ironic parable on power and its corruption, on good and evil, and on human frailty and the strength of love. The Devil appears in Moscow accompanied by a retinue of characters including a large vodka-drinking, pistol toting, black cat named Behemoth, the beautiful Margarita, and a writer known only as "The Master." These characters are joined by Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ to combine in a wildly entertaining and unforgettable tale. Bulgakov tirelessly reworked the text of this book, going through eight separate versions in twelve years, the final corrections being dictated by Bulgakov to his wife after he had gone blind. Banned for decades in the Soviet Union, it was first published there in a censored version in 1966.

Begun in 1920 while Bulgakov was employed in a hospital in the remote Caucasian outpost of Vladikavkaz, and continued when he started working for a government literary department in Moscow, Notes on a Cuff is a series of journalistic sketches which show the young doctor trying to embark on a literary career among the chaos of war, disease, politics and bureaucracy. Stylistically brilliant and brimming with humour and literary allusion, Notes on a Cuff is presented here in a new translation, along with a collection of other short pieces by Bulgakov, many of them - such as 'The Cockroach' and 'A Dissolute Man' - published for the first time in the English language.

The Civil War is drawing to an end in Russia. The White Army is disintegrating and a wave of refugees is about to descend on Turkey, and then spread across Europe. Bulgakov's play follows the fate of a small group of Russians from the Crimea to Constantinople to Paris. It is a tragic comedy that was never staged during the life of its author due to the opposition of Stalin. "There is no doubt that this is one of the masterpieces of world theatre and in this solid production of a terrific translation it is well worth catching." Peter Scott-Presland reviewing the production at the Jack Studio.

This is a title in the Bristol Classical Press Russian Texts series, in Russian with English notes, vocabulary and introduction.;Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) is well-known for his novel, "The Master and Margarita", published posthumously in the 1970s. In his own life he was best known as a playwright, with plays running at several of the leading theatres in Moscow during the 1920s and 1930s.;"Flight" takes as its subject the defeated Whites as they flee the Reds and emigrate to Constantinople and Paris. The play was too politically controversial to be staged in Bulgakov's lifetime. Couched in the form of eight "dreams" rather than conventional scenes, it hovers between tragedy and comedy.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) required the dramatic and fictional forms "as the pianist needs both his left and his right hands." While he is best known here for his novels, in the U.S.S.R. he is also famous for his plays. Neither of the plays in this volume, Flight (1926-28) and Bliss (1934), was published until long after the author's death. By 1929, his persistent refusal to conform to the demands of the Communist government and critics had led to a ban on all his work. Flight was not produced until 1957 and Bliss has never yet been produced. Flight incensed the critics because Bulgakov treated some of the Civil War's Whites as suffering, doomed human beings rather than stock images of "the class enemy." This tragicomedy is dominated by the nightmare figure of General Khludov, both executioner and victim, disintegrating as his world disintegrates. Charnota, on the other hand, is the hyperbolic image of a man hellbent for destruction, descending from White Major General to penniless gambler in Constantinople's cockroach races. In Bliss, for the first time in English translation, the engineer Rein travels to the past in his time machine and returns with Ivan the Terrible accidentally in tow. Four centuries ahead of his time, the Tsar is stranded in Rein's attic, bellowing imprecations. The bureaucrat Bunsha (a former prince who, for security in a proletarian state, insists he is the illegitimate son of his father's coachman) is foiled in efforts to report this tumultuous housing violation by an involuntary trip with Rein to the year 2222. A pickpocket, Miloslavsky, also transported to this serene, policeless future, weeps nostalgically before the museum effigy of a policeman.