The Master and Margarita

One thing I decided to do early on in my preparation for this trip was to read Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus - The Master and Margarita. It's a book that is mired in satire and social commentary. The only problem - you won't understand most of it if you aren't Russian. That's not to say that it isn't a great book, but it's difficult to see why it's such an important book without the historical Soviet background.

In any case, I read the book earlier in the semester and from there my friend recommended that I go ahead and visit some of the landmarks from the book, specifically the "bad apartment" that is the main setting in the story. Every week I said I was going to go check it out, but as with so many such things, I never did. Until this past week.

Thankfully, we were to have an excursion to the Mikhail Bulgakov museum, specifically to the part of the museum that is in Apartment #50 - the Bad Apartment. When we got there, Lena found out that our tour guide and his translator were not yet there, so for the time being, this eager guy in a suit and with gratuitous amounts of hair was going to translate for another guide. He decided that he would go ahead and translate as the other guy talked, which led to a little too much noise to really pick up everything that he said. But as luck would have it, our real translator showed up with his translator.

Our guide. I understood about 50-60% of what he said. Woo.

We started off learning about the incredible amounts of graffiti outside of the apartment door. Everything from pictures of Behemoth (a vodka-drinking giant black cat in the story) to naked pictures of a woman (i.e. Margarita) to big thank yous, to the most common "_____ was here." Almost every inch of the walls leading up to the museum was covered in such messages.

An example of Behemoth graffiti

Examples of older graffiti that has been removed.

From there we moved on to rooms that showed important parts of Bulgakov's life as he lived at apartment number 50. We got to see his study, which contained his own desk complete with a picture of Gogol, whom Bulgakov considered to be his inspiration.

That's a picture of Gogol in the middle there. Sorry 'bout the strong reflections.

Among the most interesting tidbits were that the "real" bad apartment actually belonged to an artist who lived in the building across from Bulgakov's communal flat. Our guide explained that people often saw women of questionable motives going in to the flat, and they would notice that the lights wouldn't go off all night. Thus the building got its bad reputation, which Bulgakov decided to turn upon his own home.

And finally, my favorite piece of trivia was learning that in the apartment next to Bulkagov's lived a prostitute, and because ofthe close vicinity between the two apartments, the woman's clients would often bang on Bulgakov's door while he worked, demanding that he open the door so that they might make use of his (her) services. I imagine that this was a little annoying, though I would have embraced the situation and pulled some pranks - it would have made for a good chapter in the book, I think.