The famous Moscow theatre was founded by the entrepreneur Fyodor Korsh in 1882. From the beginning of the 1920s, the theatre’s name changed a number of times (the Third Theatre of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Comedy, the Moscow Drama Theatre, etc.). In 1933, the theatre was disbanded and a branch of the Moscow Art Theatre was placed in the building. Korsh’s Theatre was mentioned by Bulgakov in The Fatal Eggs and is described in Theatrical Novel as the Schlippe Theatre. The State Theatre of Nations is currently located here.

Bulgakov regularly visited the building of the former Korsh Theatre in the mid-1930s. In 1934-1935, rehearsals and stagings of the show The Pickwick Club, in which Mikhail Afanasevich played the role of the president of the court, were held here. The actor Grigory Konsky, who shared a dressing room with Bulgakov, remembered, ‘Through the open lavatory door quickly enters a well put-together, light-haired man of middling height. In one had he has a bottle of Narzan water, in the other, a glass. He’s dressed in a brownish, wooly, loosely-fitting, even a little baggy, suit, which, for some reason, he himself describes as “camel”. That’s Mikhail.’ On that day, Bulgakov was asking the artists how much time a radio, which has been turned on, can work for – the reason for the question was soon explained: ‘The problem is that the neighbours in the flat next to mine have left for the winter, no one is left at home and the flat has naturally been locked up, but they forgot to turn off their radio. It blasts out for hours on end, day and night. It was here in the branch of the Moscow Art Theatre, that in the autumn and winter season of 1935/1936, the rehearsals for Bulgakov’s The Cabal of Hypocrites were held.