This building, constructed in 1914, is known as the ‘Military House’. From 1929 to 1932, Elena Shilovskaya lived here on the first floor with her husband Lieutenant General Evgeny Shilosky and their sons Sergey and Evgeny. In autumn, 1932, she divorced Shilovksy and married Bulgakov.
Bulgakov went to the Shilovsky’s flat on numerous occasions. Here, on the evening of 18th April 1930, he told Elena Sergeevna about his telephone call with Stalin: ‘He ran, agitated, to our flat (with Shilovsky) on Bolshoy Rzhevsky and told me the following. He lay down to sleep after lunch as usual, but the phone rang out and Lyuba called him over saying that they were calling from the Central Committee. Mikhail Afanasevich didn’t believe it and thought it was a prank…’ However, it was not a prank. A conversation took place between Stalin and Bulgakov, which would change the writer’s life. In 1932, Bulgakov was called to Shilovsky’s home. The Lieutenant General wanted to put an end to the relationship between the writer and his wife. During a tense conversation, Shilovsky whipped out his pistol to which Bulgakov answered, ‘Surely you wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man?.. Let’s have a duel! ’ (according to L. Belozerskaya, Shilovsky had threatened Bulgakov with his pistol even earlier — in the spring of 1931). No duel took place — the Lieutenant General agreed to divorce Elena.
Point on the map
This map shows where the address sits and how it is tied into the project routes.
Routes
This point belongs to one or more routes. Open them as sequential walks rather than isolated cards.
Margarita’s houses
- Stop 4
- 5,6 km
- 1,30 h
In the novel The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov accurately depicts 1920s-1930s Moscow with all her side streets, squares, houses and gardens. Even now, after dozens of years, it is possible to take the book in one’s hands and walk around practically all of the significant places in the novel. However, a number of important addresses have remained a mystery to this day. One of these is the house that inspired the house in which Margarita lived before meeting the Master – it has still not been found. In the novel, ‘Margarita Nikolaevna and her husband occupied the entire upper floor of a beautiful house in a garden on one of the lanes near Arbat’. We also know that it was a gothic house. It seems simple – follow the free and independent Margarita’s movements and spot the right house. However, it turns out that in that very lane there is and never was a gothic house. \tIn our route guide, we have gathered all the possible addresses, which could have served as the basis for the house in the novel: the Military house in which E.S. Shilovskaya lived with her husband; Solovyev’s house five minutes’ walk from Elena Sergeevna’s house; K.F. Lazarev’s block of flats not far from Mikhail Bulgakov’s final flat; and others. You can walk around each of them and choose the one which you think is the most likely to have been Margarita’s.
