Mikhail Bulgakov’s first wife, Tatiana Nikolaevna Lappa, was born in 1892 in Ryazan. Her father was a high-born nobleman Nikolay Nikolayevich Lappa. Tatiana met Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov in Kyiv in the summer of 1908. Five years later, they were married in the Kyiv Church of St. Nicholas the Good in Podil (a historic neighborhood in the city).

In the 1910s, Tatiana Lappa was her husband’s assistant: during the First World War, he served as a junior doctor in the frontline hospitals of Kamianets-Podilskyi and Chernivtsi. Then, together with Bulgakov, she went to the Smolensk Governorate, where he was a county doctor. Tatiana Lappa shared all the hardships of the Russian Civil War with Bulgakov in Kyiv, and later followed him to the North Caucasus. There Mikhail Bulgakov fell ill with relapsing fever, and Lappa helped the writer recover from the deadly disease. In the early 1920s, they moved to Moscow, where they had to adjust to living in a communal apartment. They experienced cold winters and hunger.

“Taska [Tatiana Lappa] is looking for a job as a saleswoman, which is very difficult, because the whole of Moscow is still naked, barefoot and trades ephemerally, mostly with its own forces and means, with its few people. Poor Taska has to resort to the most extreme measures and cook dinners out of basically nothing. But she’s doing great!”Bulgakov wrote to his mother in November 1921. And further in the same letter he added,

Tatiana Lappa herself recalled that while searching for a job, she learned how to make bespoke hats. However, it was difficult to receive potential customers in the only room of their communal apartment, so this idea had to be abandoned. In the autumn of 1924, Bulgakov broke up with Tatiana Lappa. Shortly before the breakup, they left the noisy and restless apartment No. 50 and settled in the opposite wing of the same building in apartment No. 34, where the family of the hereditary honorary citizen Artur Borisovich Manasevich lived. Bulgakov left his first wife and moved out of 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya forever. In the spring of 1925, they divorced.