The Author
Mikhail Bulgakov (May 15 1891– March 10, 1940) was a Russian-language novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita. He was born in 1891 in Kiev, today the capital of Ukraine. His father was a professor at the Theological Academy. After finishing high school, Bulgakov entered the Medical School of Kiev University, graduating in 1916. In 1913 he married Tatyana Lappa, who moved with him after graduation to provincial villages, where he practiced medicine. He wrote about his experiences as a doctor in his early works "Notes on Cuffs" and "Notes of a Young Country Doctor." In 1918 Bulgakov returned to Kiev, which at the end of World War I and the beginning of the Civil War in Russia was fought over between several forces: the Germans, the Ukrainian Nationalists, the Red Army (Bolshevik), and the White Army (Anti-Bolshevik). Bulgakov's brothers enlisted in the White Army and fled with them, eventually landing in Paris. Bulgakov enlisted as a field doctor with the White Army and ended up in the Caucasus, where he gave up medicine and began working as a journalist. His army experience he described in the early 1920s, when he wrote The White Guard (1924, published in 1966)--a novel about a life of a White Army officer's family in Civil war Kiev. He never left Russia, and was never granted a visa to visit his brothers--however, some details of his biography are unclear as Bulgakov was quite secretive about his past life and swore his wives to secrecy about it.
In 1919 he decided to leave medicine to pursue his love of literature. In 1921, he moved with Tatiana to Moscow where he began his career as a writer. Three years later, divorced from his first wife, he married Lyubov' Belozerskaya. He published a number of works through the early and mid 1920s, but by 1927 his career began to suffer from criticism that he was too anti-Soviet. By 1929 his career was ruined and none of his works were published due to censorship.
In 1931, Bulgakov married for the third time, to Yelena Shilovskaya, who would prove to be inspiration for the character Margarita from his most famous novel, and settled with her at Patriarch's Ponds. During the last decade of his life, Bulgakov continued to work on The Master and Margarita, wrote plays, critical works, stories, and made several translations and dramatisations of novels, but these were unpublished.
Bulgakov died from an inherited kidney disorder in 1940 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
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The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita is a fantasy satirical novel published by his wife almost thirty years after his death, in 1966. The story of its publication is almost a detective story--read the interesting Introduction in the translation published in PENGUIN BOOKS 1997:
http://www.lib.ru/BULGAKOW/master97_engl.txt
The novel is a multilayered critique of the Soviet society in general and its literary establishment specifically; it begins with Satan visiting Moscow in the 1920s or 30s, joining a conversation of a critic and a poet, busily debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. The novel was a cult book in the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s; it is a touching love story, a literature on literature, and there is a bit of ancient history in the novel (“…In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate”.) Is it a cult book now? I don’t know.

Movie
In 2005 a new screen version of the novel “The Master and Margarita” was made. In 2006 I saw the new Russian T. V. series (10 films) on TV Channel Two. I love the movie. It came as a relief that the director and screenwriter followed the original text so closely and didn't turn it in one of Hollywood 'junk' adaptations.
Home Page of the movie, where you can watch small videos:

http://www.masterimargarita.ru/

I love the Master in the movie:
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I love the image of the Master; his face, his enigmatic eye is a portrait of my soul though I look a lot like Margarita. “I am a master”, he says, and one believes him.
Margarita is divine. Woland is too old yet nice immensely:
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If you ask me, Satan is a personage of the judeo-christian mythology, a literary personage from the ancient jewish books which is a poor literature first of all, in my view, because I prefer to read other ancient literature, the works by Plato and Martial. But I love Bulgakov’s Woland--who doesn’t love him?
It is claimed that Mick Jagger was inspired by the novel in writing the song “Sympathy for the Devil”. [horrible! or rather what a platitude! meaning the title of the song.--L.B]

Master and Margarita website:
http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/

Heart of a Dog:
http://www.lib.ru/BULGAKOW/dogheart_engl.txt