In the room of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov in apartment No. 50 on Bolshaya Sadovaya, in addition to the bookshelf, several pieces of memorabilia — witnesses of the writer’s life — have been preserved. These are the entrance door and the porthole window to the left of the door.

Images of these objects can be found in Bulgakov’s prose, in particular in his “Notes of a Dead Man” (“Theatrical Novel”). The window, which was intended to illuminate bathrooms and save energy, reminded Bulgakov of the porthole on a ship,

The protagonist of the novel “Notes of a Dead Man” Sergei Leontievich Maksudov lives in a room in a communal apartment. At night he works on his novel “Black Snow”. Similarly, Mikhail Bulgakov was living in communal apartment No. 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya, and writing his novel “The White Guard”.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s room was located opposite the kitchen. The wooden door to the corridor was the only barrier between the writer’s quiet room and the noisy communal life. Bulgakov repeatedly described the customs of his neighbors in stories and feuilletons. Drunkenness, fights, swearing, and failure to respect one’s personal space — all these facets of living in apartment No. 50 allowed the writer to work on his novels only at night, when it was relatively quiet.

In a letter to his sister Nadezhda dated October 23, 1921, Bulgakov composed a verse about his life in apartment No. 50: