'A Country Doctor's Notebook' by Mikail Bulgakov

Memoir / Fiction

Stephen

8/13/20251 min read

It is a hundred years this summer since the stories / slices of memoir that make this book up started to appear in Russian periodicals, and fifty years since this translation into English by Michael Glenny was first published. It is quite a slim little volume, being less than 200 pages long, but it is beautifully written, informative and memorable. Bulgakov would go on o write novels, including famously 'the Master and Margareta' which I read last year and just did not really get on with. I can admire its technical brilliance and the fantastic imagination that dreamt it up, but it is just not my kind of book. I know many just love it. On two separate occasions while I was reading it in restaurants waitresses told me it was their absolute favourite. May be I am missing something? But this book was much more my cup of tea.

Bulgakov started out as a medical student and after graduating spent a year in a remote Ukrainian village not only working as its GP, but also carrying out all the surgery and maternity cases in a hospital that served the peasant population of a big area. It reminded me strangely of James Herriot's vet stories in that the tone is self-deprecating and uplifting at the same time, the doctor being called out at all times of the day or night and having to venture out in ghastly weather to try and help desperate patients. A flavour of the workload is provided he when he looks back after a year of country practice:

"In a moment of inspiration I opened the out-patients' register and spent an hour analysing and totalling. In a year, up to the very hour of that evening, I had seen 15,613 patients; 200 inpatients had been admitted, of whom only six died. I closed the book and tottered to bed. At twenty-five years old and celebrating my first professional anniversary, I lay in bed and thought as I fell asleep that I was now vastly experienced. What had I to fear? Nothing."

The final few stories are more fictional and concern other doctors. These are compelling tales, but for me not so splendid as the earlier ones that ae clearly more memoir than fiction.