The Niernsee House, named after the architect and owner Ernst-Richard Nirnsee, was built in 1912 at 10 Bolshoy Gnezdnikovsky lane. After the revolution, several editorial offices were opened there, and Bulgakov often visited them.

In the early 1920s, the novice writer visited the editorial office of the theater magazine “Ekran”, which rejected his feuilleton “Eugene Onegin”. He often visited the editorial office of the magazine “Russia”. Its editor, Isaiah Lezhnyov, published Bulgakov’s feuilletons, the story “Notes on a Cuff”, and part of the novel “The White Guard”. In summer 1922, the Moscow bureau of the Berlin newspaper “Nakanune” was opened in the Niernsee House. This publisher played an important role in Bulgakov’s writing career: he often published his feuilletons in it.

Emiliy Mindlin, a member of the editorial staff, described the room in which the editorial office of Nakanune was located,

The restaurant on the roof of the Niernsee House was popular with writers — it became the setting for Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Diaboliad”, written in 1923,

The Niernsee House is often mentioned in Bulgakov’s sketches and feuilletons of the first half of the 1920s and it features in his later novel “The Master and Margarita”. The Master meets Margarita on Tverskaya Street and follows her into a quiet lane. The Niernsee House is located in that very lane, called Bolshoi Gnezdnikovsky. It is in this skyscraper, the Niernsee House, that Mikhail Bulgakov and Yelena Shilovskaya had their momentous meeting in the winter of 1929.