From the author of The Master and Margarita comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction
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.
The New Yorker - George Steiner
The anarchic, resistant genius of Russian literature.
The Washington Post
Even in his earliest writings, Mikhail Bulgakov exposed the ugliness and absurdity of Soviet reality.
A. S. Byatt
One of the great writers of the twentieth century.
George Steiner - The New Yorker
The anarchic, resistant genius of Russian literature.
Library Journal
09/15/2013
Born in Kiev when it was part of the Russian Empire, Bulgakov was ultimately a writer of the Soviet era, dying in 1940. He trained as a physician but eventually abandoned medicine to become a novelist and playwright. Unfortunately, he came up against the Soviet political establishment, and his works were banned. Though at times he appealed successfully to Soviet leader Josef Stalin for protection, his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, was not published until more than a quarter century after his death. Bulgakov was wounded as a physician at the front during World War I and became addicted to morphine, a habit he managed to break a few years later. He used that experience to compose this eponymous work, which graphically presents the fictive diary of Dr. Sergey Polyakov. Unlike Bulgakov, Polyakov perishes from his addiction, and the telling is harrowing. VERDICT Though this is a slight work, Bulgakov is one of the great writers of the Soviet era and deserves to be widely known. His training certainly allowed him to depict the horrors of addiction in detail. Highly recommended where there is interest in foreign literature.—Edward Cone, New York
