Morphine

Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend's aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov's uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction -- his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

"The anarchic, resistant genius of Russian literature." George Steiner

"Even in his earliest writings, Mikhail Bulgakov exposed the ugliness and absurdity of Soviet reality." The New Yorker

"One of the great writers of the twentieth century." The Washington Post

From the author of comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was a Russian author and playwright -- one of the few writers allowed to publish during the Stalin era. His works include The Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog, and the biography, Life of Mr. de Molière.Hugh Aplin has translated works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Anton Chekhov.