The travel case belonged to a friend of the Bulgakovs, the actress Marika Chimishkian, and before that to her mother. Chimishkian brought the travel case to Moscow from Tbilisi in 1928 and settled in Bulgakov’s home at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya street. Marika met Mikhail Afanasyevich in the capital of Georgia in 1927, in the confectionery, run by Marika’s grandmother, half-French, half-Armenian. The Bulgakovs saw Chimishkian for the next few days all the time, and after their departure they tried to correspond with each other. She later recalled that at the train station in Moscow Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who also had come to meet her, got into an argument over who she would stay with. Marika also remembered that Mikhail Afanasyevich decisively picked up her suitcase and took it to Bolshaya Pirogovskaya.

Chimishkian got her nickname Marron from Bulgakov’s second wife Lyubov Yevgenyevna. Bulgakov gave her his famous photograph of him wearing a monocle and inscribed it,

Marika kept a very joyful memory of her life on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya.

In October 1929, Marika married a friend of Mikhail Bulgakov — the screenwriter Sergey Yermolinsky — and moved in with him in a house well known to Bulgakov — 9 Mansurovsky lane. But Bulgakov and Chimishkian maintained friendly relations. In the late 1930s, when Bulgakov was dying of nephrosclerosis, Marika, together with the writer’s third wife Yelena Sergeevna, kept vigil at his bedside.