Профессор Кузьмин

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Context

Professor Kuzmin is the doctor to whom Andrey Fokich Sokov, the buffet master of the Variety Theatre, goes after having heard that he would die of cancer.

In Chapter 18 of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov describes that Kuzmin «lived literally across the courtyard in a small white house». That was the house at Bolshaya Sadovaya no. 5, where also lived Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (1893-1970), Bulgakov's third wife. That same building was later demolished to make room for the hotel Pekin., one of the largest hotels in Moscow.


Prototype

Bulgakov took the name Kuzmin from Vasily Ivanovich Kuzmin (1851-1928), a Russian surgeon and professor at the universities of Moscow and Kazan who, at the end of his career, had opened a private practice in Sadovaya Kudrinskaya no. 29, near the Patriarch's pond. Many sources see him as the real prototype for the professor in The Master and Margarita, and introduce him as «one of the doctors who unsuccessfully treated Bulgakov at the end of 1939». But that is impossible, because Vasily Ivanovich Kuzmin died more than 10 years before.

The real life prototype for the Professor Kuzmin in the novel was Professor Miron Semyonovich Vovsi (1897-1960), a specialist in kidney and lung diseases. In September 1939 Bulgakov lost his sight while on a trip to Leningrad. Since he was a medical doctor himself, he immediately realized that this could be a symptom of nephrosclerosis, the illness from which his father had died. On September 15, 1939 he called his friend and doctor Andrey Andreevich Arendt (1890-1965), the founder of neurosurgery for children in the Soviet Union. Arendt introduced him to neuropathologist Mikhail Yulevich Rapoport (1891-1967), who referred Bulgakov to Miron Vovsi. The latter examined Bulgakov on September 17, 1939.

Vovsi had got his doctor's degree in 1919 at the Medical Faculty of the Moscow State University. He was known for not always paying attention to medical ethics, especially in expressing his diagnosis. He immediately told Elena Sergeevna that Bulgakov would die within three days. Bulgakov would die only seven months later, but he couldn't stop thinking of the meeting with Vovsi, and on January 15, 1940, he dictated the scene of the buffet master of the Variety Theatre and his meeting with Professor Kuzmin to his wife Elena Sergeevna.

Later, Miron Semyonovich Vovsi later became a renowned doctor who treated many high authorities and officers in the Kremlin. Together with hundreds of other doctors he was arrested in January 1953 in the so-called Doctors' Complot, when Stalin suspected a Zionist conspiracy of doctors against the Soviet leadership. Together with the physician of Stalin, doctor Vladimir Nikitich Vinogradov (1882-1964), Vovsi was considered one of the leading figures of the conspiracy. On April 4, 1953, one month after the death of Joseph Stalin, it was officially announced that the doctors were innocent, and that same evening, Vovsi was released again.

It is said that, on the day of his release, doctor Vovsi gave a lecture at the Institute for Advanced Medical Training before he returned home, and that he got a standing ovation there.


Prediction

In a letter which Elena Sergeevna wrote to Nikolay Afanasievich Bulgakov (1898-1966), the younger brother of the writer, on January 5, 1961, she wrote that Bulgakov had already made a prediction about his own death in 1932. «He said it would happen in 1939», she wrote. Like doctor Vosvi, he had been mistaken for seven months.



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