Diaboliad and Other Stories

In Diaboliad and Other Stories, Mikhail Bulgakov unleashes a brilliant early vision of the absurd that would later culminate in The Master and Margarita.

This Abrams Press edition brings to life Bulgakov’s first collection of short stories in the acclaimed, unabridged translation by Carl and Ellendea Proffer. From bureaucratic nightmares to sharp social satire, this volume includes rare 1920s newspaper sketches (feuilletons) and expert commentary not found in other editions. It is the most complete and historically accurate way to discover the origins of Bulgakov’s genius.

The title novella follows Korotkov, a meek Soviet office clerk abruptly fired over a trivial mistake and plunged into a nightmarish maze of offices, documents, and doubling identities. What begins as a bureaucratic inconvenience rapidly mutates into a surreal descent, where authority is faceless, logic dissolves, and reality itself seems to conspire against the individual. Both darkly comic and deeply unsettling, Diaboliad stands as one of the sharpest literary indictments of modern bureaucracy ever written. 

The accompanying stories extend Bulgakov’s satire into realms of grotesque fantasy, social parody, and moral fable. Across these tales, scientists overreach, institutions collapse under their own absurdity, and ordinary people are crushed—or transformed—by systems they cannot comprehend. Drawing on traditions associated with Gogol and Dostoevsky while forging a voice unmistakably his own, Bulgakov blends realism with the bizarre, exposing how easily reason gives way to chaos in a world governed by ideology and paperwork.

Written in the early 1920s, these stories provoked controversy upon publication for their unflinching portrayal of Soviet life and their refusal to offer comforting resolutions. Bulgakov’s targets are not merely political structures but the deeper human cost of dehumanization: the erosion of identity, the terror of power without accountability, and the fragility of sanity under relentless pressure. Even a century later, the humor remains biting, the nightmares eerily familiar, and the insights disturbingly relevant.

Essential reading for fans of classic satire, speculative fiction, and modernist literature, Diaboliad and Other Storie offers a vivid introduction to Bulgakov’s imaginative world. These early works reveal the foundations of his later masterpieces while standing powerfully on their own—as prophetic, ferocious, and darkly entertaining explorations of what happens when systems matter more than people.