Friends and acquaintances of Mikhail Bulgakov visiting him noticed the writer’s bookshelves full of encyclopedias and dictionaries. The photo of Bulgakov’s study in the apartment at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street shows all the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron.

In the late 1920s, Mikhail Afanasyevich began working on a novel about the devil, later called “The Master and Margarita”. And even its first edition included scenes in Yershalaim. To collect historical information, Bulgakov primarily used reference books and dictionaries from his home library. In the Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron Bulgakov carefully studied the sections “Demon”, “Demonology”, “Demonomania”, “Witchcraft”, “Satan”, “Devil”.

Perhaps this article is the source of the idea for one of the key chapters of “The Master and Margarita”, “Satan’s Great Ball”.

Volume 46 of the Encyclopedia has a biographical article on Pontius Pilate, which states that he was the fifth procurator of Judea. Bulgakov studied many sources to determine exactly which procurator Pilate was — the fifth or sixth: the information varied. The early editions of the novel referred to Pontius Pilate as the sixth procurator of Judea, but Bulgakov eventually dropped the phrase because of these discrepancies.

While working on “The Master and Margarita” Bulgakov carefully studied the book “The Myth of Christ” which came out in 1926 in the publishing house “Atheist”. Bulgakov used this book to find arguments in favor of the fact that the historical Christ did not exist, providing them to the chairman of MASSOLIT Berlioz.

Some characters in Bulgakov’s works also resort to the encyclopedic dictionaries of Brockhaus and Efron. Mikhail Afanasyevich wrote a feuilleton “How much Brockhaus can the organism bear?” It is about how “one lazy librarian”, when asked by a mechanic who was eager to learn, replied that “there is information about ‘absolutely everything’ in Brockhaus’s dictionary.”