Mikhail Bulgakov was a Russian playwright, novelist, and physician best known for his satirical classic, The Master and Margarita. Born in Kiev in 1891, Bulgakov was drawn to both literature and the theater from his early youth. As a young man, Bulgakov studied to become a doctor and volunteered with the Red Cross during the First World War. He practiced medicine for some years after WWI, and was eventually drafted as an army physician during the Russian Civil War. He contracted typhus and nearly died at his posting, and after a shaky recovery he began his professional transition from physician to playwright and author. From 1919 until his death in 1940, his plays, short stories, and novels enjoyed degrees of critical and popular success, but Bulgakov also endured a great deal of criticism and censorship due to his propensity to mercilessly satirize the ethical and political shortcomings of life in the Soviet Union. His witty, biting, and frequently grotesque storytelling style caught the eye of Joseph Stalin, earning him some degree of political immunity. By the end of the 1920s, however, Bulgakov’s career had ground to a halt due to a government ban on the performance or publication of his work. Bulgakov’s relationship with Stalin protected him from arrest and execution, but he could not publish any of his works or stage his plays for the remaining years of his life. Over the next decade, the ailing writer began work on The Master and Margarita, which would be his last major creative effort before his death. A brilliant satire of Soviet society, it was not published until 1966, 26 years after his death. Although he never experienced stable success and renown during his life, Bulgakov’s body of work is now firmly situated within the pantheon of great 20th century Russian literature and theater.
As the new reality of post-Revolution Soviet life begins to settle in, a gifted but eccentric zoologist named Persikov invents a machine that revolutionizes the growth of living organisms by drastically increasing their size and reproductive rates. Meanwhile, a mysterious plague has wiped out the entire poultry population of Russia, raising concerns about the government’s ability to feed its people. Hoping to use Persikov’s yet-untested invention to revive the decimated chicken population, the secret service confiscates Persikov’s machine—to disastrous results. One of Bulgakov’s only longer works that was published in its entirety during his lifetime, The Fatal Eggs was inspired by H. G. Wells’s 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, in which two scientists discover a method of accelerating growth that backfires through the creation of a plague of giant chickens and then a war between affected and unaffected humans. The Fatal Eggs enjoyed a widely positive reception upon its release in the Nedra journal in 1925. However, like much of Bulgakov’s work, the science fiction novella was also disapproved of by certain Soviet critics who saw the tale as an anti-Soviet satire of the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of post-war leadership.The Alma Classics edition of Fatal Eggs is translated by Roger Cockrell with the authorization of the Bulgakov Estate and Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Roger Cockrell was previously the Head of the Department of Russian at the University of Exeter and has worked extensively on expert translations of Russian works including other Bulgakov works such as Black Snow and The White Guard. His translation reflects the clear, humorous, and profound language of the original with colloquial English idioms and phrasings. Readers without previous experience in Russian literature will find this translation to be accessible and fun, even though the subtext of Bulgakov’s works is the murky, mysterious underbelly of Soviet culture.
In 1930s Moscow, Satan decides to pay the good people of the Soviet Union a visit. In old Jerusalem, the fateful meeting of Pilate and Yeshua and the murder of Judas in garden of Gethsemane unfold. At the intersection of fantasy and realism, satire and unflinching emotional truths, Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita eloquently lampoons every aspect of Soviet life under Stalin’s regime, from politics to art to religion, while interrogating the complexities between good and evil, innocence and guilt, and freedom and oppression. Spanning from Moscow to Biblical Jerusalem, a vibrant cast of characters—a "magician" who is actually the devil in disguise, a giant cat, a witch, a fanged assassin—sow mayhem and madness wherever they go, mocking artists, intellectuals, and politicians alike. In and out of the fray weaves a man known only as the Master, a writer demoralized by government censorship, and his mysterious lover, Margarita.Burned in 1928 by the author and restarted in 1930, The Master and Margarita was Bulgakov’s last completed creative work before his death in 1940. The novel was not published until 1966—26 years after Bulgakov’s death—but has since become one of the most well-regarded works of Russian literature of the 20th Century. The novel was an immediate success upon its publication. Its enduring and widespread popularity saw it adapted or referenced in film, television, radio, comic strips , theater productions, music, and opera.The Alma Classics edition of The Master and Margarita is translated by Hugh Aplin with the authorization of the Bulgakov Estate and Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Hugh Aplin has worked at the Universities of Leeds and St. Andrews and is currently Head of Russian at Westminster School, London. His translation reflects the clear, humorous, and profound language of the original with colloquial English idioms and phrasings. Readers without previous experience in Russian literature will find this translation to be accessible and fun, even though the subtext of Bulgakov’s works is the murky, mysterious underbelly of Soviet culture.
Lauded Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart (also translated as The Heart of a Dog) is a zany, violent, and whimsical satire of the failures inherent in the dream of a Communist utopia, following dog-turned-human Sharik as he tries and fails utterly to live a life of goodness and virtue—but goodness and virtue as defined by whom?Both a nod to the Frankenstein myth and a vicious critique of the Soviet government’s attempts to reshape and redefine personhood during and after the Russian Revolution, the popular tale poses the question, what taints Sharik’s thoughts and actions? Is it the heart of the dog, the corrupted flesh of the human man he was transformed with, or the attempts by his creators to turn Sharik into a model citizen and human being?Like many of Bulgakov’s novels and plays, A Dog’s Heart was rejected for publication by censors in 1925, but was circulated via samizdat (the clandestine production and distribution of literature that had been banned by the state) for years until it was translated into English in 1968—it would not be officially published in the Soviet Union until 1987. To this day, the book remains one of Bulgakov’s most controversial novels, although it is widely read and highly regarded alongside the famously sharp-witted author’s most famous work, The Master and Margarita.The Alma Classics edition of A Dog’s Heart is translated by Antonina W. Bouis with the authorization of the Bulgakov Estate and Andrew Nurnberg Associates. Antonina W. Bouis is an accomplished translator, working with several major publishing houses such as University of Texas Press, Alfred A. Knopf, and OneWorld Classics Ltd. to bring the best of Russian literature to English readers. Her translation reflects the clear, humorous, and profound language of the original with colloquial English idioms and phrasings. Readers without previous experience in Russian literature will find this translation to be accessible and fun, even though the subtext of Bulgakov’s works is the murky, mysterious underbelly of Soviet culture.
