The premiere of the performance based on Bulgakov’s play “The Days of the Turbins” took place on October 5, 1926 on the main stage of the Moscow Art Theater. The writer became famous that night.

The performances ran almost every day, with the audience coming in droves, fearing that the performance could be banned at any moment. A passionate fan of the theater, policeman Sergey Gavrilov, who was on duty at performances at the Moscow Art Theatre for several years, described the situation at Bulgakov’s performances as follows,

The theater was besieged by crowds of eager theatergoers; as a secret informant reported to the Lubyanka (secret police), “at the entrance there was a whole wall of dealers selling tickets for ‘The Days of the Turbins’ at triple the price”. An ambulance was constantly on duty at the entrance to the hall.

Meanwhile, the Soviet press published scathing reviews of “The Turbins”. Critics scolded Bulgakov’s play for propaganda of the White Movement, accused the author of narrow-mindedness and philistinism, described the text itself as patently weak. The newspaper satirist Mikhail Levidov wrote a review of the play in “The Evening Moscow”,

Standing out from the crowd was the critic Alexander Orlinsky, who often expressed his views at anti-Bulgakov disputes and in newspaper articles. The critics Alexander Orlinsky and Osaf Litovsky are considered to be prototypes of the critic Latunsky from the novel “The Master and Margarita”, the persecutor of the Master.

Shortly before the premiere, Bulgakov received a prescription for a +0.75 monocle in the right eye at the polyclinic. The author of the play was photographed wearing this monocle, and the pictures were then given to family and friends. In those years, a monocle seemed too extravagant an accessory. Many years later, Valentin Kataev in a conversation with the Bulgakov scholar Marietta Chudakova recalled,