Mikhail Bulgakov Museum

In apartment No. 50 of building No. 10 on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, Russia’s first state museum dedicated to Mikhail Bulgakov operates. It was these very rooms that the writer used as the prototype for the legendary “bad apartment” in The Master and Margarita — the flat where Woland’s retinue took up residence and where the cat Behemoth set off a fire.

The building was constructed in 1902–1903 in the Art Nouveau style by architects Edmund Yuditsky and Antonin Milkov, commissioned by tobacco manufacturer Ilya Pigit; locals still call it “Pigit’s House.” The spacious apartments were rented by the well-off creative public of the time; among the building’s residents were painters Pyotr Konchalovsky and Vasily Surikov, as well as theatrical artist Georgy Yakulov — at one of the parties in his studio, Sergei Yesenin first met Isadora Duncan. After the 1917 revolution, the building was nationalized, and starting in 1919, the apartments began to be converted into communal flats, populated by workers from nearby factories.

In the autumn of 1921, Mikhail Bulgakov moved into one of the rooms of that very communal apartment with his first wife, Tatiana Lappa; the following three years became a period of intensive work for him — he wrote The White Guard, Diaboliad, Fatal Eggs, and numerous essays and satirical pieces. The setting and atmosphere of the communal flat were later reflected in The Master and Margarita, where the address of the “bad apartment” almost exactly replicates the real one.

The idea of creating a museum here first arose in the early 1980s: Natalya Romanova, an employee of a design institute that was working in these rooms at the time, set up an improvised Bulgakov exhibition, and in 1989 the first Bulgakov festival was held at Patriarch’s Ponds. In 1990, literary scholar Marietta Chudakova headed a specially created foundation named after the writer, which took over the care of the apartment, and in 1994 the premises were officially transferred to its stewardship. The state museum opened on March 26, 2007, by decision of the Moscow city government.

The walls of stairwell No. 6, along the so-called “bad staircase,” have been covered since the 1980s with drawings and quotations left by fans of the novel and are protected as part of the memorial zone. The museum’s collection, numbering more than three thousand items, is divided into historical and literary sections: the writer’s study has been recreated with authentic furniture, an installation depicting a 1920s communal kitchen has been set up, and the living room hosts concerts and performances. The museum later acquired additional venues — a memorial apartment on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street and an educational and research center in Bolshoy Afanasyevsky Lane.

The museum on Bolshaya Sadovaya remains a point where the writer’s life and the fictional world of his greatest novel intersect: this is a rare case in which a real Soviet communal apartment became not merely a memorial site, but a full-fledged literary space, drawing Bulgakov fans from around the world.