On the fifth floor of this house lived Bulgakov’s acquaitances Vera and Ivan Kreshkov. At the writer’s suggestion, they once summoned spirits at their ‘three-legged table’. Bulgakov described this evening in the satirical tale The Spiritual Séance (1922).
Bulgakov’s first wife Tatyana Lappa remembered the Kreshkov family whom they befriended at the beginning of the 1920s: ‘Her husband Ivan Pavlovich and her lived at Malaya Bronnaya, house 30… Vera Fedorovna, it seems, was the daughter of a priest and Ivan Pavlovich was the son of a civil servant from Vladikavkaz. He taught mathematics in the Military Academy in Petrovsky Park. She was so… formidable’. Once, Bulgakov proposed something to his wife: ‘Do you know what? Let’s have a spiritual séance at the Kreshov’s place tonight! ’ A lover of pranks and hoaxes, Bulgakov put his wife up to knocking the table when he touched her leg at the right moment. The unkind and extremely derisive description of the hosts in the tale, The Spiritual Séance, offended the Kreshkovs and they cut off contact with the Bulgakovs.
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First address
- Stop 7
- 2,1 km
- 1 h
The route encompasses sites of literary and biographical significance in the life of Bulgakov, centred around the environs of Patriarch’s Ponds. \tAt the end of September 1921, Bulgakov arrived in Moscow with the intention of becoming a writer – his first address was flat 50 in house 10 on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. Bulgakov’s first three years in Moscow were closely connected with the region around the Patriarch’s Ponds. The Patriarch’s Ponds are not only important in Bulgakov’s biography, but also in his works – this is where the events of The Master and Margarita begin. In the novel, Woland and his retinue live on Bolshaya Sadovaya, the characters in the tale The Spiritual Séance inhabit 32 Malaya Bronnaya, and so on.
