Soviet and post-Soviet Russia produced a tradition of psychiatrists and psychologists who worked across clinical practice and popular writing, bringing questions of mental health to professional and general audiences alike. Mikhail Efimovich Litvak was born on June 20, 1938, in Rostov-on-Don, and he died in that same city on September 10, 2020.

Litvak trained at Rostov State Medical University and worked as a psychiatrist, psychologist, and psychotherapist. Alongside his clinical roles, he built a career as a non-fiction writer, producing work in the Russian language that engaged with psychological and therapeutic subjects. He was a citizen of both the Soviet Union and Russia, meaning his life and career spanned two distinct political eras in the country's history. His writing placed him among Russian-language authors who addressed non-fiction readers on topics drawn from psychology and psychotherapy.

The Library of Congress catalogued his work under the authorized form "Litvak, M. E. (Mikhail Efimovich)," a designation that reflects the documented scope of his published output. That bibliographic record identifies him as a Russian-language non-fiction writer whose work merited formal archival classification. He was born in Rostov-on-Don and educated at Rostov State Medical University, and it was in Rostov-on-Don that he died, having worked across the overlapping fields of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and non-fiction writing throughout his life.