It is assumed that this is where the main characters of the novel The Master and Margarita first met: ‘She turned off Tverskaya into the side-street and looked behind her. Well, it’s Tverskaya you know? Thousands of people were walking along Tverskaya, but I give you my word, she saw only me and she did not look alarmed, but rather as if she were ill.’ Not far from here in one of the houses at the start of Bolshoy Gnezdnikovsky lane, the first meeting between Bulgakov and his third wife possibly took place.

In February 1929, Bulgakov met his future third wife at a dinner party at E. Nirnzee’s house (No. 10). ‘At the table sat an interesting lady with a beautiful haircut, Elena Sergeevna Nurenberg, married name – Shilovskaya,’ remembered L. Belozerskaya, ‘she soon became my lady friend and began to come to our home often and on an inform basis’. According to Elena Bulgakova herself, the meeting with Bulgakov did not come around without some, ‘sorcery’. ‘It was a fast, usually fast, love, on my part anyway… Some fastening came loose on my sleeve… I asked him to tie it for me and he always swore that this was some kind of sorcery, that I had tied him to me for life.

In the summer of 1929, Elena Bulgakova left for a holiday in Yessentuki and Bulgakov wrote beautiful letters and sent red rose petals to her. In one of the letter, he mentioned that he had prepared a gift for Elena Sergeevna – it turned out to be the short novel, To a Secret Friend.