An essential companion to someone like Kafka, but with a sharper ear for Soviet institutional comedy.

Diaboliad gathers Bulgakov’s early satirical stories from the 1920s, his obsession with bureaucracy mutating into farce and administrative logic slipping into nightmare. These pieces sit squarely in the aftermath of revolution: offices proliferate, paperwork acquires a will of its own, and individuals dissolve into clerks, files, and errors.

The tone is comic, but the worldview is bleakly precise. One of my favourite authors of this era for sure.