Moliere was Bulgakov’s favorite playwright, and Mikhail Afanasyevich nurtured the idea of a play about him for a long time. It took four years to prepare the production itself at the Moscow Art Academic Theater. There were obstacles associated with Soviet censorship: the play, like many other works by Bulgakov, was banned for staging, and then allowed. Besides, there were certain creative disagreements within the theater. When Konstantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theater, was shown the nearly finished play in the spring of 1935, he decided to radically change the play, offering his own vision of the characters.

When the premiere finally took place, the audience was in raptures. Bulgakov’s third wife Yelena Sergeevna recalled,

Despite the success, the play did not run for long.

Chairman of the Committee for the Arts at the Council of People’s Commissars Platon Kerzhentsev submitted to the Politburo an extensive report on “Moliere”. Kerzhentsev, a longtime adversary of Bulgakov, wrote a scathing review of the production. At the same time, he suggested not banning the play, as it would draw unnecessary attention to the writer, but publishing an editorial that would give the theater the necessary signal, so the Moscow Art Theater management itself would remove the play from the repertoire.

That same night an unsigned editorial entitled “Outer gloss and false content” was typed and printed. It developed Kerzhentsev’s arguments.

The article said,

Yelena Sergeevna left an entry in her diary on the day of publication, March 9, 1936, “When we read it, Mikhail Afanasyevich said,

Bulgakov was right — the article in Pravda was the beginning of a full-scale campaign against the writer. Mikhail Afanasyevich was especially outraged by the haste at which the theater removed the play from the repertoire. Having resigned from the Moscow Art Theater, Bulgakov went to work at the Bolshoi Theater.