[1] The main protagonist of the play, thirty-five year old widower Zoya Denisovna, hopes to save up money to escape to France.
She uses her multiple-room apartment to earn money under the guise of a fashion studio, in actuality an extravagant brothel at night, and in doing so exploits the system of the New Economic Plan.
[3] It is believed Bulgakov had based the story on a real salon owned by a Zoya Shatova in the area of the Nikitsky Boulevard in Moscow;[3] he had "heard of a woman called Zoya, who had run a dressmaking establishment that became a gambling den by night".
He selected the location of the fictional apartment in Bol'shaya Sadovaya street, where he had previously lived with his first wife Tatianna Lappa.
In the end, the Politburo passed a resolution to lift the ban as it was "the Vakhtangov Theater's only means of existence".