Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov arrived in Moscow in September 1921. With his first wife Tatiana Nikolaevna Lappa, he settled in a room of communal apartment No. 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya. The first months were very difficult for their family: they did not have enough money to live on and had to find a job in Moscow. “This is the darkest period of my life. My wife and I are starving… Even our valenki crumbled,” Mikhail Bulgakov complained in his diary in the winter of 1922.
In a letter to his mother Varvara Mikhailovna, the writer outlined a plan for the following three years, “to get back to the norm — get an apartment, clothes, food and books.”
“There was already furniture in this room — two cabinets, a walnut desk, a sofa, a large mirror… There were even some dishes — a white soup tureen. And at first, we ate on a white kitchen cabinet. Then one day I was walking in Moscow and I heard: ‘Tasenka, hello! ’. It was the wife of a treasurer from Saratov. She invited me to her house. ‘Come on, I have your parents’ furniture.’ It turned out that she took furniture from Saratov, including my parents’ table. It was oval, with bent legs made of walnut… Then we bought a long bookshelf — on its sides it had two sphinxes — and hung it over the desk,” the writer’s wife recalled.
Obviously, in Tatiana Lappa’s memory, mermaids and lions turned into sphinxes. And yet it is this shelf that is the only material witness to the writer’s life in this room. For Bulgakov, it was an important purchase — a symbol of a possible return to pre-revolutionary comfort.
Friends and acquaintances of Mikhail Bulgakov recalled how carefully he collected his library, knew almost all second hand booksellers in the area, and how he tried to find money to buy both old editions and novelties. Bulgakov kept the books he acquired on this unusual bookshelf.
A year later, thanks to the earnings from his books, Bulgakov was able to buy a furniture set upholstered in silk. The small boudoir-style furniture did not fit their communal life, but the couple still enjoyed it.
Mikhail Bulgakov left apartment No. 50 in November 1924, divorced Tatiana Lappa, changed several addresses in Moscow and soon rented and later acquired his own apartment. Due to numerous relocations, the furniture from Bolshaya Sadovaya was lost, and only this bookshelf has been preserved, which, as in Bulgakov’s time, hangs above a desk.
“Books are his weakness. ‘Please do not take the books’ — reads a warning on one of the shelves,” recalled the writer’s second wife Lyubov Belozerskaya.
