The number from Bulgakov’s apartment in Nashchokinsky Lane was transferred to the museum from Paris

History of the rescue of the exhibit

This week, a press brunch was held at the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum – behind this clever foreign word there is a press conference with a tea party.

The essence of the event is that the museum revealed plans for 2024 and “reported” on the work to replenish funds and restore existing exhibits.

Our correspondent selected the most interesting from the array of information dumped on the heads of journalists by museum workers.

Bulgakov remains one of the most popular writers among millions of people. Moreover, it was not so much his works that went to the people, but rather “mystical incidents” from his life or the story of a courageous telephone conversation with Stalin. And thanks to “The Master and Margarita,” the “bad apartment” on Arbat remains as iconic a reality as Boris Pasternak’s House in Peredelkino, “Tsoi’s Wall” on Arbat, or the “Erofeevskaya” Moscow-Petushki train that disappeared with the advent of MCD-4.

Therefore, everything that happens in the museum deserves attention. Like, say, the completely non-mysterious story of a new exhibit that entered the collection. We are talking about a door sign with two fours – it would seem that you can find as many of these at a flea market. But the chief curator of the museum, Irina Chupina, assured MK that this is the same number that hung on the door of Mikhail Afanasyevich’s last home – his apartment in Nashchokinsky Lane (in the USSR, this location was called Furmanov Street).

“Mikhail Bulgakov moved with his wife Elena Sergeevna and stepson Sergei to his long-awaited apartment in the newly built cooperative writers’ house on February 19, 1934. Despite the lengthy construction, the quality of the floors and sound insulation turned out to be very low; the writer never received the coveted silence necessary for work. But it was here that he completed and edited the novel “The Master and Margarita”, wrote “The Theatrical Novel”, the plays “Bliss” and “Ivan Vasilyevich”, and in this house he received friends from the theatrical, literary and musical world. In the same apartment, in the arms of his wife, he died on March 10, 1940,” said Irina.

And she told the main thing – the background of saving the sign:

– This number was preserved miraculously – the French cultural attaché, philologist, political scientist and diplomat Yves Aman, together with his friend, historian Alexander Bogoslovsky, who lived in a house on Furmanov Street before being resettled in the mid-1970s, took it off the door to the Bulgakovs’ apartment. The house was later demolished.

Moreover, according to the diplomat’s memoirs, this is precisely the tablet that Bulgakov “saw” during his lifetime, and not a later version – which is very important, because the classic died in 1940, and resettlement occurred several decades later.

In 2022, according to Chupina, the curator of museum objects, Alexander Roginsky, met with Yves Aman in Paris. Then the former French attache told this story and donated number 44 to the museum.

Note that in total the Bulgakov Museum houses 8,175 exhibits, with 739 received in 2023. The plaque is, in our opinion, the most valuable, but Mayakovsky’s book deserves mention, on the fifth page of which is a close friend of Mikhail Bulgakov and his second wife Lyubov Belozerskaya Natalya Ushakova portrayed them as the parents of the main character, “Vlas, the lazy man and the loafer.” In addition, the museum received the family album of Andrei Arendt (a pediatric neurosurgeon), where, on one of the spreads, there was a photograph of Bulgakov from the 1930s. Documents/photos from the archives of Nikolai Lyamin and the above-mentioned Ushakova also became significant.

In general, 2024 promises to be quite a “Bulgakov year.” Several exhibitions await us: in honor of the 125th anniversary of Yuri Olesha, in honor of the 130th anniversary of Isaac Babel; also a project reflecting the relationship between Bulgakov and Vladimir Dmitriev, a student of Meyerhold and the Moscow Art Theater friend Mikhail Afanasyevich. And, in addition to this, two “apartment” exhibitions about the life of Bulgakov and his first wife Tatyana Lappa in a communal apartment on Bolshaya Sadovaya, 10 (Ilya Pigit’s house is just turning 120 years old). Plus, we will see an exhibition, again associated with the Moscow Art Theatre, about the production of Bulgakov’s play “Alexander Pushkin” about the duel and death of the poet, which in 1943 was designated on theater posters as “The Last Days.”