The wooden wall-mounted cabinet was housed in Mikhail Bulgakov’s apartment in Nashchokinsky Lane. It was probably made according to sketches of the artist Yelena Dmitrievna Polenova in the early 20^thcentury in the Abramtsevo Carpentry Workshop.

The cabinet is noticeably different in style from the rest of the mahogany furniture from Mikhail Bulgakov’s apartment in Nashchokinsky Lane, and it has not yet been possible to establish in which of the three rooms it hung.

Mikhail Bulgakov lived in apartment No. 44 at 3/5 Nashchokinsky Lane from February 1934 until his death in March 1940. In that apartment, he worked on his opus magnum “The Master and Margarita”, which Bulgakov himself called his “sunset novel”, and read excerpts from it to his closest friends.

On May 11, 1937, Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, Mikhail Bulgakov’s third wife, mentioned in her diary one of these literary evenings,

The artist Pyotr Vladimirovich Williams was a close friend of the writer. He worked at a theater and made sketches, including for productions of Bulgakov’s plays.

Bulgakov read the final chapters of his novel on May 14, 1939, at his home for a select circle of friends. Elena Bulgakova noted the next day, “For some reason, the last chapters were listened to in a stiff atmosphere. Everything scared them. Pasha in the corridor assured me in a frightened way that in no case should we attempt to publish — there could be terrible consequences.” Their fears were related to the fact that Bulgakov was considering the possibility of completing the novel and presenting it “upstairs” to Joseph Stalin.

Mikhail Bulgakov did not have time to complete “The Master and Margarita”: at the end of the summer of 1939, he fell seriously ill, and on March 10 of the following year he died in his apartment in Nashchokinsky Lane.

Elena Bulgakova promised her husband before his death that the novel would be published. The text became available to the general public only a quarter of a century later, when several chapters of “The Master and Margarita” were published in two issues of the Moscow magazine in late 1966 and early 1967.