In Russian literature there are writers who control fate and are controlled by fate. Mikhail Bulgakov is one of the latter. His entire existence was continuous, meaningful, doomed to defeat in life and to a brilliant victory in literature, a duel with Fate. What needs to be done with a person, what gift to reward him with, what ups and downs, temptations, trials and temptations to put him through, how to weave a life story, what friends, enemies and amazing women to give him so that he can write “The White Guard”, “Heart of a Dog” ", "Theatrical Romance", "Running", "The Cabal of the Saint", "The Master and Margarita"? Prose writer, Doctor of Philology, laureate of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn literary prize, as well as the Anti-Booker, Big Book, etc. awards, author of the biographies of M. M. Prishvin, A. S. Green and A. N. Tolstoy Alexey Varlamov offers his version of the fate of the writer, whose books have caused admiration, indignation, fierce debate, love and doubt for many decades, but leave few people indifferent and have undoubted, sustainable success all over the world.

Fragments of the painting were used in the binding design Dmitry Belyukin “White Russia. Exodus" and illustrations by Gennady Novozhilov for the novel "The Master and Margarita".

When preparing the electronic copy, references to literature were translated into a form more familiar to ZhZL and convenient for the electronic version (the book number in the bibliography is in square brackets, semicolon – page number in the book). Please do not blame me for possible technical errors.