Bulgakov played chess since childhood. His first wife Tatyana Nikolayevna Lappa recalled that Mikhail often played chess with her father. To a large extent, it was the interest in chess that brought Bulgakov closer to Nikolay Nikolaevich Lyamin, a philologist and employee of the State Academy of Arts.

They met in the mid-1920s at the writer Sergey Zayaitsky’s house, where Mikhail Afanasyevich recited excerpts from his novel “The White Guard”. Lyubov Belozerskaya, Bulgakov’s second wife, recalled in her memoirs that after meeting the Lyamins, Bulgakov began to hold recitations mainly at their place. Lyamin and his wife, the artist Natalia Ushakova, lived in Pozharsky lane (Savelievsky in Bulgakov’s time) and occupied two rooms with a fireplace in a communal apartment. Thanks to the fireplace, it was warm in the rooms even in the coldest months. On July 18, 1925 Bulgakov gave Lyamin his just-released debut collection of short stories and novels entitled “Diaboliad” with a gift inscription, “To my best friend Nikolay Nikolaevich Lyamin.”

Lyamin was seriously interested in chess. An early version of the novel about the devil, which would later be called “The Master and Margarita”, has an episode where Ivan Bezdomny, pursuing Woland, runs into the entrance of a house in Savelyevsky lane. And the doorman says to the poet,

Borya could be the art historian Boris Shaposhnikov or Bulgakov’s relative Boris Zemsky, both of whom were Bulgakov’s chess partners.

In later editions, the writer replaced the fragment with chess with a scene of a naked woman in the bathroom, where Ivan Bezdomny broke into. However, there is a scene with chess in the novel: Woland and Behemoth play it.