Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) Born in Kiev, Ukraine. Bulgakov became a physician, but after WWI, gave up medicine for writing. His famous novel, The Master and Margarita, was written between 1929 and his death in 1940. (Quotes below were translated by the Webmaster) "What was he like? Merry. Artistic. Brilliant. His everyday, his homelife, outwardly, wasn't ascetic and solitary, although the inside meaning of his life was. While making fun, teasing, he transported the elements of the everyday into his creations... So what was he like? Reserved. Aloof. Intolerant of familiarities. He greatly valued his distance in relationships, and knew how to maintain it. He opened up, and even then not completely, only to a small circle of closest friends."  --Marietta Chudakova "He had his strangenesses that showed at times, and at times he was torn between conflicting views; but in moments of crisis he never lost his self-possession and his strength for life [..] His irony invariably was part of some bigger feeling. His witticisms were always on the mark, at times sarcastic and needling, but never vulgar or shocking. He didn't scorn people, but he hated haughtiness, dullness, monotony, careerism, insincerity and deceit, no matter what form this last one took: actions, words, even hand gestures. He himself was fearless and steadfastly straightforward in his opinions. A lie could never become a truth for him. He never turned off the road he chose as his life."  --P.S. Popov (1940 bio left unpublished)