Mikhail Bulgakov

Trained as a doctor and briefly addicted to the morphine he prescribed himself, Bulgakov gave up medicine for the Moscow stage, where his plays drew audiences and, increasingly, official bans. Desperate and out of work, he wrote directly to Stalin asking for permission to emigrate; Stalin telephoned him instead, granting a theater job and a strange, uneasy protection that let him keep working while his fiction went unpublished.

He spent his last twelve years writing The Master and Margarita in secret, revising it obsessively even as he went blind, dictating final changes to his wife Elena from his deathbed in 1940. The novel surfaced only in a censored 1966 magazine edition, a generation after his death, and its vision of a devil loose in atheist Moscow (the same satirical instinct behind Heart of a Dog's New Soviet Man) became the most beloved Russian novel of the century almost overnight.