The mahogany bureau of the first quarter of the 19th century was presented to Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov by his wife in honor of his name day on November 21, 1934.

On this day, Elena Bulgakova wrote in her diary,

The bureau stood by the window in the writer’s office in his apartment in Nashchokinsky Lane. Its shelves were filled with encyclopedias and dictionaries, Bulgakov’s manuscripts and writing materials. At the very top, there was an elegant desk clock. At this bureau, the writer worked on the play “Moliere”, staged in 1936 by the Moscow Art Theater. The production was a great success, but it was very quickly withdrawn from the theaters at the suggestion of Platon Kerzhentsev (chairman of the Committee on Arts) and with the consent of Joseph Stalin.

This was followed by a powerful anti-Bulgakov campaign — from that moment on, not a single work of the writer was published and not a single play of his saw the limelight. Mikhail Bulgakov was getting more and more immersed in working on texts that were not intended for publication.

At the bureau presented in the exhibition, Mikhail Bulgakov, by candlelight, began to write his “Notes of a Dead Man” (“Theatrical Novel”) — a work about the theatrical backstage and the literary world of the USSR in the 1930s. He also worked on other pieces, including his most famous novel “The Master and Margarita”.