The red and blue pencils were found in one of the secret drawers of Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing bureau.

Bulgakov did not use a typewriter: he either wrote by hand or dictated his texts to someone else. The drafts of “The Master and Margarita” contain fragments taken down from the writer’s dictation by his second wife, Lyubov Belozerskaya, and later by his third wife, Yelena Sergeevna. When Bulgakov wrote himself, he did not usually use separate sheets, but writing books. The play “Zoyka’s Apartment”, early versions of the novel “The Master and Margarita”, “Moliere” and other works were written in writing books. Red and blue pencils were other important items in Bulgakov’s creative routine: he used them to mark important passages in manuscripts, newspapers, journals, and books. He pasted reviews of his works into a special album, thus keeping a kind of chronicle of his own literary journey through the eyes of critics.

Mikhail Bulgakov began writing his first novel “The White Guard” at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street in a communal apartment No. 50, and already then he edited the text with a red pencil. That habit may have developed long before that, perhaps while he was still at university, reading books on medicine.

Sergey Alexandrovich Yermolinsky, Bulgakov’s friend, playwright and screenwriter, recalled: “One day he came to me and announced triumphantly,

Bulgakov was an emotional reader: the letters he received and the articles and books he read are peppered with exclamation and question marks, thick underlines in straight or squiggly lines.

The writing bureau, where the red and blue pencils were found, was given to Bulgakov as a present for the name day by his wife Yelena Sergeevna. It stood in Bulgakov’s study in Nashchokinsky Lane, where Mikhail Afanasyevich and Yelena Sergeevna moved in February 1934. Now the bureau is displayed in another location of the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum — in the “Bad Apartment” at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street.