The biography of Mikhail Bulgakov has been the object of a number of studies in the West as well as in the Soviet Union, and the present study assumes that the availability of these monographs renders it unnecessary to rehearse the story of his childhood and of the first part of his career as a writer. My purpose here is to draw attention to a distinct period in Bulgakov's writing, his last decade, and to suggest the many ways in which his intellectual preoccupation with the fate of literature spilled over into his fiction and even came to dominate it during the 1930s. Within the chronological limits set for this study, I have traced a pattern of gradual retreat in Bulgakov's treatment of the major theme of his writing throughout the period of the composition of The Master and Margarita, that of the writer and his relations with society. Official rejection of his biographical works on Molière and on Pushkin, and the frustration of his attempts to introduce Gogol as the lyrical narrator of his own literary creations, obliged Bulgakov increasingly to concentrate his views about the destiny of the writer in the purely fictional character of the Master, hero of a novel that looked unlikely to be published. In the last years of his life Bulgakov's concern at the constraints imposed on creative endeavour gave way to bitterness at the realization of his own defeat.