Mikhail Afanas'evich Bulgakov was born in Kiev, the current capital of Ukraine, in 1891. His father, Afanasii Ivanovich Bulgakov, was a respected academic at the Kiev Ecclesiastical Academy, and died in 1907, when Mikhail was 16. He married his first wife, Tatyana Lappa, in 1913, and graduated from Kiev University's Medical School in 1916. Once he had graduated they moved to the provinces, where Bulgakov began his practice of medicine in the villages, which he later documented in his early works Notes on Cuffs (1923) and A Country Doctor's Notebook (1925).
In 1918 Bulgakov returned to Kiev, where he set up a private practice before enlisting in the anti-Bolshevik White Army as a field...
