Another eighteen months or so later, the upheavals of the Civil War caused Bulgakov to move to the Caucasus, where he resolved to give up medicine in favour of writing. After eighteen strenuous months in general practice (the subject-matter of most of this book) he decided to specialise, and set up in Kiev as a venereologist. He studied at Kiev University and qualified in medicine in1916.
Cronin are perhaps three of the best known-and with this collection of stories Mikhail Bulgakov is revealed as another writer who gained his earliest and perhaps his deepest insights into human nature through the practice of medicine.īorn in 1891, Mikhail Bulgakov was the eldest of the six children of a professor at Kiev Theological Academy. There have been several doctor-writers, Russian and English, in recent times-Chekhov, Somerset Maugham and A. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Not yet marked by the dark fantasy of his later writing, this early work features a realistic and wonderfully engaging narrative voice-the voice, indeed, of twentieth century Russia’s greatest writer. Bulgakov candidly speaks of his own feelings of inadequacy, and warmly and wittily conjures episodes such as peasants applying medicine to their outer clothing rather than their skin, and finding himself charged with delivering a baby-having only read about the procedure in text books. The stories in A Country Doctor’s Notebook are based on this two-year window in the life of the great modernist. And the challenges he faced didn’t end there: he was assigned to cover a vast and sprawling territory that was as yet unvisited by modern conveniences such as the motor car, the telephone, and electric lights.
He brought to his position a diploma and a complete lack of field experience. In 1916 a 25-year-old, newly qualified doctor named Mikhail Bulgakov was posted to the remote Russian countryside. Part autobiography, part fiction, this early work by the author of The Master and Margarita shows a master at the dawn of his craft, and a nation divided by centuries of unequal progress.
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