group photograph at a tennis court with Mikhail Bulgakov was taken in the summer of 1926 in the village of Kryukovo. It shows from left to right: Alexei Ponsov, Lyubov Belozerskaya, Dmitry Ponsov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolay Lyamin, Ivan Nikitinsky, and Sergey Topleninov.

Several such incidents spoiled the vacation mood of the writer, and after returning to Moscow Bulgakov began to think how to spend the rest of the summer.

Nikolay Lyamin, a friend of Mikhail Afanasyevich and a literary scholar, recommended the writer to rest in Kryukovo, at the Ponsov family’s dacha near Moscow. Bulgakov and Belozerskaya went there to look around and were very pleased both with the nature and living conditions, as well as the friendly hosts. In Kryukovo the Bulgakov family liked it much more than in Miskhor: the company turned out to be cheerful and like-minded. Yelena Ponsova, the daughter of the dacha’s owners, married Viktor Stanitsyn, an actor of the Moscow Art Theater. She had met him at a banquet thrown by Bulgakov after the premiere of “The Days of the Turbins” in October 1926.

Bulgakov maintained good relations with the Ponsovs. In the 1930s, Yelena Ponsova and her husband Viktor Stanitsyn visited Bulgakov in Nashchokinsky lane and received the writer at their home.