Abstract
This article discusses Mikhail Bulgakov's (1891–1940) short‐story cycle, Notes of a Young Doctor (Zapiski iunogo vracha, 1925–28), as an underworld descent journey, or katabasis. Set in a shadowy hinterland in 1917–18, the cycle is one of Bulgakov's earliest explorations of a theme characteristic of his mature work–the irruption of the supernatural into the everyday. The influence of the katabasis is both linguistic and formal, as the cycle shuttles back and forth in time, which contracts and expands depending on the narrator's proximity to or distance from the realization that he is not meant to be a doctor at all, but a writer. His transformation is effected by the descent itself, which follows in the traumatic wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Far from thwarting the writer, it is the precipitating factor in his becoming one.
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