SOURCE: "Development of a Writer, 1891-1921" and "Moscow and Journalism, 1921-24," in Mikhail Bulgakov: Life and Interpretations, University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 3-31, 32-44.

Wright is an English educator, author, and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses Notes of a Young Doctor and the short fiction of Bulgakov that appeared in various Russian journals in the early 1920s.

The publication of Bulgakov's medical stories dates from a later period, but he probably made notes for some of them while he was still in Nikolskoe [in the Sychyovka district of Smolensk province in 1916-17], and certainly he made drafts before he left Kiev .. . in 1919. There are nine of them altogether, all except one published in a medical journal, Meditsinskii rabotnik, between 1925 and 1927. In order of publication these are: 'First Breech,' 'Snowstorm,' 'Egyptian Darkness,' 'Starry Rash,' 'Towel with a Rooster,' 'The Missing Eye,'...