The Mikhail Bulgakov Museum is the first and the only state memorial museum of Bulgakov in Russia. It was established in 2007 in apartment 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street.
Today the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum consists of three different spaces with their own permanent and temporary exhibitions and educational programs: the legendary “bad apartment” at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, the Bulgakov Memorial Apartment at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, and the Scientific and Educational Center at 35–37 Bolshoy Afanasievsky lane, building 4.
The museum’s mission is to tell a comprehensive story about Bulgakov’s work, the Bulgakov Moscow and the culture of the Bulgakov era. The museum actively expands the scope of cultural activities, opens exhibitions and organizes events at its own and third-party venues.
At first, the museum opened at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, the same place where Bulgakov settled in the fall of 1921, having just arrived in Moscow. Together with his first wife, Tatiana Lappa, he rented a room in a large communal apartment. At night he wrote his first Moscow works in this room.
The image of the communal apartment and the house “in the shape of the letter П located on Sadovaya Street” often appeared in Mikhail Afanasyevich’s texts. For example, in the stories “Psalm”, “Moonshine Lake”, “No. 13 — The Elpit Workers’ Commune Building”, the play “Zoyka’s Apartment” and, of course, in “The Master and Margarita” — the novel that immortalized the house and its inhabitants. In 1990, the Bulgakov Foundation was established with the aim of opening apartment No. 50 to the public.
Now the famous “bad apartment” is a museum where visitors can immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the first years of the writer’s life in Moscow. The apartment turned out to be a point of contact between the three eras of Russian reality — post-Soviet modernity, the Soviet past (with its everyday life, its literature, its tragedies and lessons) and the era of pre-revolutionary Russia, of which Bulgakov was a full-fledged citizen until the age of 26 and whose nostalgia is felt in his books. Bulgakov’s work unites these three eras.
In December 2021, a new museum opened in the writer’s apartment at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street. The museum’s exhibition is devoted to Bulgakov’s work, its context of being, ways of interpreting his works and, of course, Mikhail Afanasyevich’s biography, where prototypes of his characters and the origins of plot motifs are often found.
