From 1927, Moscow Art Theatre artist Evgeny Kaluzhsky lived in this house. In 1932, Olga Bokshanskaya (the secretary to V. Nemirovich-Danchenko and the older sister of Bulgakov’s third wife, Elena Bulgakova) became Kaluzhsky’s second wife. Before 1936, the Kaluzhskys had lived in General-Lieutenant E. Shilovsky’s flat, and then, aside from a number of temporary addresses, settled in the house on Maly Vlasevsky Lane. On 26th June 1939, Bulgakov read The Master and Margarita in the Kaluzhskys’ house.
‘Stroev, who had become lost in chatter in Toropetskaya’s dressing room at that time, hurried to the auditorium, jumping down the stairs’ — according to E. Bulgakova, in Theatrical Novel, Kaluzhsky and his spouse, Olga Bokshanskaya, featured in the depictions of the actor Stroev and Poliksena Toropetskaya. Like the Bulgakovs, Evgeny and Olga got married in 1932. The Kaluzhskys often visited Mikhail and Elena Bulgakov on Pirogovka and Nashchokinsky Lane — together they celebrated birthdays, the new year, attended readings at home and so on. Elena wrote about one of these meetings in her diary in 1933: ‘31st December. The Kaluzhskys, Leontevs and Arendts are coming over. They’ve arrived. It was lovely. Zhenya Kaluzhsky and Leontev were dying from laughter at some unpleasant joke verses, which Mikhail composed for the new year. The poems were decent, but the rhymes should have been different. The Kaluzhskys stayed the night’. Because of its suitable location, some researchers believe the house could have been one of the models for Margarita’s house.
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 5
- 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.
