The early-20^th-century steam radiator from 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya serves as a reminder of the prosperous pre-revolutionary life of this building — when the plumbing was in good condition, the separated apartments were heated, and the life of a respectable apartment building was ordered and calm. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov described these times in the feuilleton “No. 13. — The Elpit Workers’ Commune Building”. The prototype of the Elpit building in Bulgakov’s story was building No. 10 on Bolshaya Sadovaya, which the residents called Pigit’s house, after its owner, the tobacco manufacturer Ilya Davidovich Pigit.

After the Russian Revolution, the house was nationalized, the apartments were divided and turned into communal ones. From then on, unfortunately, apartment No. 50 was not always heated, and neither was the entire house. After nationalization and increasing the occupancy, there was a plethora of problems with heating. It was precisely because of this unfortunate issue and a carelessly operated potbelly stove that the house did burn down — the one from the pages of Mikhail Bulgakov’s “No. 13. — The Elpit Workers’ Commune Building”:

Artifacts of the old life (radiators, moldings on the ceiling, preserved parquet in some places) were now side by side with primuses, irons, cans and bottles — the symbols of the new era. Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived in communal apartments for several years, involuntarily became a brilliant expert on the housing issue of the 1920s. The result of his wanderings through the capital’s communal apartments was a small collection of short stories “The Treatise on Housing”, published in 1926.