White Guard. Notes of a Young Doctor

In addition to the famous novel "The White Guard" by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, which for the first time is printed in full, without abridgements, the book includes no less famous series of short stories by the writer "Notes of a Young Doctor", supplemented by the stories "I Killed", "Morphius" and "The Extraordinary Adventures of the Doctor". The texts are illustrated with drawings and letters by contemporary artist Tatyana Kosach and provided with commentary by literary critic Lidia Yanovskaya.The series of stories "Notes of a Young Doctor" and the novel "The White Guard" by M. A. Bulgakov reflect many episodes of the writer's life. Mikhail Afanasyevich spent his childhood in a large friendly intelligent family in Kiev. The whirlwind of the Civil War picked up and scattered it in different directions. The dramatic events of that time formed the basis of the novel "The White Guard". Bulgakov graduated from the medical faculty of Kiev University. Then there was work in the small village of Nikolskoye, Smolensk province, where the young doctor was saved from drug addiction by his wife Tatiana Lappa. Difficult cases from his medical practice Bulgakov will later describe in stories. The decision to seriously engage in literature, he took in Vladikavkaz, working as a military doctor. Shortly before the arrival of the Red Army, Mikhail Afanasyevich fell ill with typhoid fever, and was forced to stay in the country. In an effort to leave Russia, Bulgakov and his wife made their way to Batumi, but there he had a fateful meeting with Osip Mandelstam. The poet convinced Mikhail Afanasyevich to go to Moscow and there to print his works. In the capital Bulgakov began to write feuilletons for various newspapers and magazines, and in 1925 the magazine "Russia" began to publish his novel "The White Guard". In the same year, the Moscow Art Theater management offered Bulgakov to remake the novel for staging on stage, and soon the play "The Days of the Turbins" premiered. Bulgakov did not hide his controversial attitude to the revolution. Stalin in his speeches repeatedly said that "Days of the Turbins" - a work of anti-Soviet, but he also ordered to return the play to the stage when its staging was banned. Mikhail Afanasyevich lived only forty-nine years. After his death, AA Fadeev wrote that it was "... a man who did not burden himself in his work or in life political lies .... His path was sincere, organic, and if in the heat of his path (and sometimes later), he did not see everything as it really was, it is not surprising: it would be worse if he falsified...".The book is illustrated with drawings by contemporary St. Petersburg artist Tatiana Kosach. She graduated from the History Department of St. Petersburg State University and is a specialist in the art of the Middle Ages. Her iconographic and graphic works can be found in private collections of art lovers in Russia, USA, Italy and France. In the BML series, her illustrations have graced the novels American Tragedy, The Financier, Titan, Theodore Dreiser's Stoic, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and Abroise Bierce's Stories.