It would take years to identify all the references in this masterpiece. Here is compilation of information we collected from various sources (namely the Jan Vonhellemont Annotations and the Middlebury Annotations), but remember that there are always more references!
Bulgakov wrote this passage around the same time Yevgeny Petrov wrote a similar scene in his book The Golden Calf. Both were probably based off the History of a Town, written by Mikhail Yefgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin.
