In March 1925, Mikhail Bulgakov received a court summons from the People’s Court of the Krasnopresnensky District on the question of his divorce from his first wife, Tatyana Lappa.

Bulgakov married his first wife Tatyana Nikolaevna Lappa on 26th April 1913 in Kiev. They spent eleven years together, at the frontline hospitals during the First World War, at the Nikolskaya District Hospital, and they were caught out by a ‘terrible year’ in Kiev and the horrors of the Civil War in the Caucasus. In January 1924, at a dinner party in honour of returning Smenovekhovtsy (emigrés who decided to accept the Soviet government), Bulgakov met Lyubov Evgenevna Belozerskaya, his future second wife. In the spring of 1925, he divorced T. Lappa and in April of the same year, married L.E. Belozerskaya. Another famous literary figure received summons to the People’s Court of the Krasnopresnensky District – Sergey Esenin (at the beginning of the 1920s, the poet was prosecuted under a number of articles of the Criminal Code).