Shifting Accommodation is a short humorous story by the famous Russian writer, playwright and theatrical personage Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (1891 - 1940).
From the Diary of an ingenious comrade Polosukhin:
November 21.
Well, Moscow… What a city… Oh, I will tell
you now. There are no available apartments here.
Absolutely no vacant flats! I even had to send a
telegram to my wife and tell her to stay home and wait
for a while. I slept three nights in the bathtub at
Karabuev's apartment. Well, what can I say, not that
bad as it may seem, pretty comfortable, I would say,
just water dripping from time to time. Then I slept two
nights on a gas stove at Shchuevsky's apartment. In
Yelabuga, my hometown, people say that this stove is a
very convenient thing. Hell no, I say! Some screws are
