Bulgakov met the agriculturist Nikolay Rakitsky in 1916 in Smolensk province, where Mikhail Afanasyevich worked as a doctor. The next time they met was after the revolution — they both moved to Moscow. At that time Bulgakov had already left his medical practice for the sake of his writing career. Nikolay Rakitsky often attended literary meetings where Bulgakov would give recitations of his works to a small circle of friends.

In 1925, Mikhail Bulgakov and Lyubov Belozerskaya, and Nikolay Rakitsky and his wife Sophia Fedorchenko spent a vacation in Koktebel at the house of the poet Maximilian Voloshin. Lyubov Yevgenyevna later told about this trip in detail in her memoirs. In Moscow, Rakitsky and his wife lived near Bulgakov; the writer rented an apartment at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya, and Nikolay and Sophia lived at 11 Prechistenka Street, in the basement of the Leo Tolstoy Museum. Once, as Lyubov Belozerskaya later recalled, she and Mikhail Afanasyevich dropped in for tea at their friends’ place and met Boris Pasternak there, then still unknown to both of them,

In April 1969, Nikolay Rakitsky wrote a memoir about Mikhail Bulgakov, in which he recounted, among other things, Bulgakov’s witty response to his detractors. Rakitsky recalled an episode when in 1930, banned and deprived of livelihood Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a “Letter to the Government of the USSR”. A few weeks later, Bulgakov received a phone call from Stalin at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street. As a result of this short telephone conversation Bulgakov was hired by the Moscow Art Theater as an assistant-director. Rumors about this story spread around Moscow, and, as Rakitsky later recalled, once when a Moscow playwright asked Bulgakov sarcastically what role he had been offered to play at the Moscow Art Theatre, the writer replied,

Rakitsky is also known for creating a unique arboretum in Tarusa, where he collected plants from different climatic zones. It still exists to this day.