Mikhail Bulgakov Museum. The Odd Flat. (Moscow)

 literary museum, historic house museum

The once luxurious rental house, built to the money of the millionaire Ilya Pigit, the owner of the tobacco factory “Ducat”, was fitted for the first working commune after the revolution. The house, which remembered Aysedora Dunkan and Sergey Esenin, Alice Koonen and Andrey Beliy, Vasiliy Surikov and Fedor Shalyapin, imaginists and futurists, the members of the artistic group “The Diamond Jack”, and the whole Moscow bohemians, was filled up with the proletariat in the first post-revolutionary years. The studios of the artists Petr Konchalovskiy and Georgiy Yakulov, which were situated in the court of the house 10, were kept, and artistic life continued to pulsate there weakly. What occurred in other apartments – Bulgakov described vividly in the stories “№ 13 – Elpit Rabcommune Building”, “The Psalm”, “The Moonshine Lake”, and finally in the novel “Master and Margaret”. The communal flat № 50, where Mikhail Bulgakov and his wife lived in 1921 – 1924, became the prototype of that “Odd Flat”, where Voland with the suite settled up, and where that leading to another measurement mysterious stairs is situated. Years passed, and the stairs of the entrance № 6 became a bewitched place: since 1970s people come here to sit on those steps, where Annushka found the horse-shoe, to recollect the favourite fragments from the Novel, to sing and to dream. The stairs became one of the unofficial cultural centres on the map of Moscow of 1980-90s. On the garret “The Academy of Hippie” was organized, and the walls of the entrance were covered with drawings, quotations from Bulgakov’s works, declarations of love to Bulgakov and his personages. All these years the door of the flat № 50 was closed for the worshippers of writer: there was a design office. But in the 1990s the Bulgakov Fund was based there, and then since April 2007 – the only official in Russia Bulgakov Museum.
Now “The Odd Flat” revived and not only shadows of literary personages and former tenants roam here. It is opened for everyone, who wants to find himself inside the Novel, to learn more about Bulgakov and his epoch, to communicate with like-minded persons.
Gradually a constant exposition was created on the base of the collections of Bulgakov’s nieces E.A. Zemskaya and V.M. Svetlaeva, and also V.F. Dimenko’s collection.
Cultural events in “The Odd Flat”: plays of the theatre “KomediantЪ”, the first half of 20th century jazz concerts and concerts of classical music, exhibitions and subject seminars: culturological seminars are connected with the club “New Moscow”, literary-philosophical – with the work of the Bulgakov discussion club, and traditional meetings of Aleksey Didurov’s Rock-cabaret.