"Do you always swear at your patients?" With the ink still wet on his medical diploma, 25-year-old Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia, which in 1916 was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone, or electric light. In this semi-autobiographical novel from the author of The Master and Margarita, how his alter-ego copes (and fails to) with the often appalling responsibilities of a lone practitioner in a vast country practice—through blizzards, pursued by wolves, and on the eve of Revolution—is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.
"These straightforward yet extraordinary sketches gain their effect from being also the account of a young man's growth. One begins to see that he became a novelist not because he had material but because he was storing up passion and temperament."—New Statesman