A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov

Suppose they bring me a hernia? Just tell me how I’ll find my bearings with that?”Īs the book progresses the doctor slowly begins to gain confidence and discovers that true knowledge comes with experience. Didn’t I warn them back in town that I wanted to start off as a junior partner in a practice? But no, they just smiled and said, ‘You’ll get your bearings.’ So now I’ve got to find my bearings. “I’ve got my degree and a first class one at that.

“It’s not my fault,” I repeated to myself stubbornly and unhappily. Most of all, the young doctor lives in fear of encountering a strangulated hernia, a case of peritonitis or a difficult birth and he comes to dread hearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night. With no electricity, no telephones, poor roads, the risk of being cut off from the world during snowstorms, and the ignorance of peasants regarding simple medical matters, life at Muryovo is primitive and isolated. He is pleased to find that the hospital is clean and well equipped, but with no practical experience and nobody to turn to for advice (apart from a feldsher, or partly-qualified assistant, and two midwives) the thought of bearing sole responsibility for the lives of his patients terrifies him.ĭuring his first weeks and months at Muryovo, the country doctor faces all sorts of problems for which his university education had completely failed to prepare him. The fictional doctor in the book, Vladimir Bomgard, is clearly based on Bulgakov himself and in the first story we see him as a young, newly-qualified doctor of twenty-four arriving at Muryovo Hospital, a full day’s drive from the nearest town. After graduating from Kiev University he became a physician and from 1916-1918 he worked at a small hospital near a remote village in the province of Smolensk.

Like the protagonist of this book, Mikhail Bulgakov was a ‘country doctor’. I knew this book was going to be very different from The Master and Margarita, but I hoped I would still enjoy it…and I did.Ī Country Doctor’s Notebook is a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories originally written in Russian in the 1920s (the edition I read uses Michael Glenny’s English translation from 1975). I was happy when I discovered that I would be reading this one, not only because it’s much shorter than most of the others on my Classics Club list, but also because I loved Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita which I read four years ago in 2011. A Country Doctor’s Notebook is the book that was selected for me in the last Classics Club Spin.

A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov