The Bulgakov Museum Visit

Mikhail Bulgakov was a Soviet Russian writer and playwright active in the beginning of the 20th century. The Master and Margarita novel made him world famous. This book is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.

Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891, at the time part of the Russian Empire. Receiving a medical education, he was a volunteer with the Red Cross in the First World War and was drafted into the Ukrainian People’s Army at the outbreak of the Russian Civil war. Bulgakov lived and worked in the Soviet Union, but he never supported the Soviet authorities.

During the Revolution the majority of his family fought on the White side and after the Bolshevik took power, emigrated to France. Bulgakov was refused permission to leave, ill with typhus. This turned out to be his greatest misfortune, as he never saw his family again.

As with many creative people of the era, he had a very difficult life in the Soviet Union. The majority of his plays were refused permission to be staged. In despair, he wrote a letter to Stalin, asking permission to leave the country. Stalin replied that a Soviet writer could either live in the Soviet Union, or not at all. The implication was if Bulgakov tried to leave, he would be killed.

His «Master and Margarita» novel was forbidden reading in the Soviet Union and only published in 1967, 26 years after the writer’s death.

The House N 10 at Bolshaya Sadovaya, where Bulgakov lived in a communal apartment, is now his memorial museum.  The atmosphere of the «Not-good-apartment» as christened by the author inspired numerous stories, including the «Master and Margarita». The current inhabitants of House N10 were opposed to the museum being set up in the apartment but Bulgakov fans won. Now everybody can enjoy a visit to this special, mysterious place and travel as though in the Bulgakov-times in Moscow on the period 302-Bis Tram.

The excursion lasts 1,5h (15 min in the Museum and 1h tram ride)