His posthumous rehabilitation began slowly in the late 1950s, and starting in 1962 several volumes of his works, including plays, novels, short stories, and his biography of Molière, were published.

He had a tender spot for Mikhail Bulgakov's theatre plays. A Russian Writer Speaks to Stalin Mikhail Bulgakov May – June 1969 Throughout most of his career, Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, was under attack by Party critics. We will never know what would have … His sincerity may be questionable because, when Bulgakov was called by Stalin in person a few weeks later, on April 18, 1930, four days after the suicide of Vladimir Vladimirovitch Mayakovsky (1893-1930), and Stalin asked him if he really wanted to leave the country, Bulgakov replied that, as a Russian writer, he could never live outside Russia and the Russian language. Bulgakov’s works were slow to benefit from the limited “thaw” that characterized the Soviet literary milieu following the death of Stalin. During his whole career Stalin acted as a censor. He even re-wrote parts of the work of Maxim Gorky, he said that the poets Osip Emilevich Mandelstam (1891-1935) and Anna Akhmatova, pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko (1889-1966) were geniuses, while he censored their works.