The “bad apartment” is located on the 4th floor of building No. 10 on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. One of its nine communal rooms once served as the first Moscow shelter for Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov, a young writer and former doctor. In apartment No. 50, he wrote his first novel “The White Guard”, living there for three difficult years with his wife Tatiana Nikolaevna Lappa. Bulgakov described his communal life and neighbors in stories and feuilletons.
The writer immortalized this apartment in his novel “The Master and Margarita”, where he named it “bad”. The first museum dedicated to Bulgakov in Russia was opened here and work began on collecting memorabilia.
The building at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya itself has a
fascinating history. Over a century ago, it was built by the tobacco magnate
Ilya Davidovich Pigit. The building became an example of Art Nouveau
architecture, and the community formed around it was a vivid example of the
lifestyle of the creative atmosphere during the Russian Silver Age. Artists,
poets, writers, and actors — representatives of the bright Moscow bohemia of
the 1910s–1930s — lived in these studio apartments.
Exhibits are marked with AR stickers for identification purposes.
