This wooden hanger was once used in the apartment of Mikhail and Elena Bulgakovs in Nashchokinsky Lane. There, in the cooperative house for writers, Bulgakov received a three-room apartment with a long corridor.

A family friend and teacher at the Moscow Art Theater School, Vitaly Yakovlevich Vilenkin, recalled that the Bulgakovs“…had a poster that hung on the wall of the hallway and showed a bottle crossed out with a red stroke and the saying: ‘Vodka is the enemy, and a savings bank is a friend’.”

Mikhail Bulgakov loved such things. The writer Valentin Petrovich Kataev recalled that back in the 1920s, in the room of apartment No. 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya, Bulgakov’s desk “…had various curios snippets from illustrated magazines, critical reviews pasted on it…”, for example, the name of the emigrant newspaper “The Day Before” (“Nakanune” in Russian) was changed by the writer using collage technique into “Nunenaka”. It was a clever play on words.

In the 1930s, already in his own apartment, Mikhail Bulgakov displayed his favorite drawings and photographs on the walls. The family’s guests warmly remembered Elena Bulgakova’s hospitality and the comfort of apartment No. 44.

The Soviet screenwriter and playwright Sergei Aleksandrovich Ermolinsky wrote about his visits to the Bulgakovs,

The joy of obtaining his own home eventually turned to disappointment. Most of all, the writer suffered from noise. There was almost no sound insulation in the house, and, as Bulgakov’s neighbor, the playwright Yevgeny Iosifovich Gabrilovich, noted, they “…could clearly hear everything that happened behind these walls: feasts and quarrels, laughter, singing, and edifying speeches for children.”Elena Bulgakova complained that when they were dancing upstairs, it was impossible for Bulgakov to work.

Mikhail Bulgakov applied several times for another apartment in the new writer’s house in Lavrushinsky Lane, but was refused each time. It is no coincidence that in the novel “The Master and Margarita” he described with such pleasure the chaos that Margarita caused in the Dramlit House: its image was based on the very writer’s house in Lavrushinsky Lane.