“For a moment I was convinced that I understood nothing,” he despairs, but nonetheless returns to the theatre, sets to work, and with a few hints from his midwives, performs the necessary procedure. I began hastily to leaf through the glossy pages,” he says, reading out all manner of appalling outcomes that could occur should he make a mistake. “There it was – Döderlein’s Operative Obstetrics. In what is possibly my favourite moment in the book, the doctor, panicking at the idea of having to carry out a complex procedure to turn the baby in the womb, comes up with a flimsy excuse of needing a cigarette (that wouldn’t wash these days) and dashes back to his rooms. “I’m like Dmitry the Pretender - nothing but a sham.”īut he struggles on, doing his best, learning, improving, making mistakes – as we all do – when disaster strikes: his worst nightmare, a difficult childbirth, turns up. What on earth will I do? What a fool I was! I should have refused this job, I really should,” he frets. “I forgot about deliveries! Incorrect positions. Unsurprisingly, he is struck by what we would diagnose as impostor syndrome today.
Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Imagesįrom day one, he finds he has big shoes to fill, with the previous incumbent revered by the midwives and medical assistant.
In 1966-7, thanks to the persistance of his widow, the novel made a first, incomplete, appearance in Moskva, and in 1973 appeared in full.Author Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). In 1938, a year before contracting a fatal illness, he completed his prose masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. Stalin telephoned him personally and offered to arrange a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre instead. By 1930 Bulgakov had become so frustrated by the political atmosphere and the suppression of his works that he wrote to Stalin begging to be allowed to emigrate if he was not to be given the opportunity to make his living as a writer in the USSR. This was one of the many defeats he was to suffer at the hands of his censors. In 1925 he completed the satirical novella The Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891 - 1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he graduated as a doctor in 1916, but gave up the practice of medicine in 1920 to devote himself to literature.
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