A collection of previously unknown drafts of the novels “The Twelve Chairs”, “The Golden Calf”, “The Master and Margarita”. These fragments resonate so vividly with modern times that they allow us to take a fresh look at the creative heritage of I. Ilf, E. Petrov and M. Bulgakov. If the lines of drafts of three famous books published today, created in the first half of the 20th century, were included in the canonical text of novels, contemporaries would hardly have felt the severity of the sudden coincidences and understood the hidden meaning of some lines. But now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we can appreciate the undoubted predictive gift of writers.