How Marina Tsvetaeva’s Flat Became a Communal Flat

Marina Tsvetaeva’s flat No. 3 at 6 Borisoglebsky Lane became a communal flat gradually. After 1917, the family first lost its former sources of income and reduced the space they occupied; by the final year before the poet’s emigration, other people were already living on the upper level. After Tsvetaeva left with her daughter in May 1922, all the flats in the building became communal. Museum documents and descriptions of the rooms allow us to trace this change, but do not justify treating the present furnishings as an untouched interior from 1914.

The history of the house extends well beyond the biography of its famous resident. The Marina Tsvetaeva House-Museum’s exhibition ‘Flat No. 3 and Its Surroundings’ explores the years 1917–1941: the transition from separate flats to shared accommodation, changing neighbours and the rules of everyday life. According to official information checked on 4 November 2026, the exhibition opened on 27 August 2025 and is scheduled to run until 31 December 2026.

What was flat No. 3 like before it became communal?

In 1914, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sergei Efron and their two-year-old daughter Ariadna rented a home in a rental apartment building. Built in 1862, the building contained four flats: two on the ground floor and two on the first floor. Flat No. 3 stood out for its complex layout, with internal staircases and rooms on different levels. This arrangement explains why the subsequent reduction in living space meant the family moving within a familiar home, as well as losing space they had previously occupied.

According to the history of the house published by the museum, the building had already undergone changes before Tsvetaeva arrived: substantial internal alterations are dated to sometime between 1899 and 1914, although no more precise date has been established. Partitions divided the large reception rooms, new openings and a fireplace were added, and electricity and a telephone were installed. Even the flat as the family saw it in 1914 should therefore not be presented as the original mid-19th-century design.

The museum’s visitor guide lists a dining room, music room, Tsvetaeva’s room, nursery, Efron’s room, kitchen, bathroom and attic room. Internal staircases connected the different levels of the flat; the attic room was usually let out. Having a separate tenant in a pre-revolutionary flat and the later introduction of communal living were different arrangements: the former does not mean that the entire flat was already communal.

The visitor guide gives further details of the layout: the music room had no natural light and served as a passage from the dining room to the nursery and Tsvetaeva’s private room. The lower window in Sergei Efron’s room gave access to the flat roof of an extension, which served as a terrace. These details matter when tracing how additional residents were accommodated. The upper rooms, into which other people later moved, originally formed part of a single flat spread across several levels. However, the published description of the flat in 1914 does not show which doors and passages remained shared after the new residents moved in: establishing this would require a plan or an official record of alterations from the relevant year.

Marina Tsvetaeva: 6 Borisoglebsky Lane

The rental apartment building where Tsvetaeva lived was part of a property comprising several buildings. On an 1844 plan described by the museum, an orchard is still marked on the site of the future Tsvetaeva house, while another building, subsequently lost, stands along the lane. Two houses faced the street, and two stood further back in a leafy courtyard with a well; there were also outbuildings. When later documents refer to a resident of ‘6 Borisoglebsky Lane’, this establishes only the address of the property as a whole: without further evidence, it cannot identify a particular building or flat.

The owner of the plot, Alexandra Sobko, initially obtained permission in 1859 to build a single masonry house, but the scheme remained on paper. In 1862, a revised design was approved for a two-storey house with a residential basement and mezzanine levels. The museum describes a seven-bay façade with rustication on the ground floor and a pediment above the central bay. Behind the regular street façade were rooms of varying heights and small rooms facing the courtyard; the windows at different levels on the side elevation help explain this complexity. According to the museum’s history of the house, a separate entrance from the courtyard to the first floor was later moved to the basement, leaving a tall window opening in its former position.

An early description of the building states that the 1862 design was signed by the senior architect Nikiforov. In a 2022 interview, museum director Yulia Chursina reported on later archival research by staff member Marina Doronina, which identified Kazimir Vikentyevich Grinevsky as the building’s architect. The signature on the drawing and the attribution of the building come from separate accounts. The published materials neither reproduce the drawings nor explain how the roles of Nikiforov and Grinevsky were divided. The interior was substantially altered between 1899 and 1914, so not every staircase and partition familiar to Marina Ivanovna can be attributed to the building’s architect.

Among the owners was Collegiate Councillor Alexander Tsvetaev, who shared the poet’s surname; the house had passed to his family long before she moved in. The shared surname does not imply a family relationship or explain her choice of address. More significant for the history of the flat is that in 1914 it was rented accommodation with an already altered layout. Later, the same property allowed people of differing means, professions and rights to rooms to live alongside one another.

The layout as recalled by Anastasia Tsvetaeva

Anastasia Tsvetaeva recorded her sister’s account of first viewing the flat. In this recollection, published later, Marina takes her on an imaginary tour from the front door, through a space with a skylight to the nursery and her own room, then up the internal staircase to Sergei Efron’s room and the kitchen. Anastasia mentions the small rooms that her sister initially considered unnecessary or suitable for letting out. This account shows how the family perceived the flat before additional residents moved in; it is not a measured plan and does not establish the floor area of the rooms.

Comparison with the museum’s visitor guide helps explain the different room counts. In her sister’s recollection, Marina lists the main living rooms, mentioning the kitchen and small rooms separately. The museum’s visitor guide also takes visitors through the guest room, attic room, bathroom and back staircase. Different numbers of rooms in popular accounts should therefore not automatically be seen as a disagreement over floor area: first, it is necessary to establish whether the count includes connecting rooms, service rooms and rooms that were let out.

When did the house begin to become communal?

A city review of the exhibition tentatively dates the introduction of additional residents into flat No. 3 to late 1919 or early 1920. By the time Tsvetaeva left in May 1922, other people were already occupying the upper level, as confirmed by the museum’s visitor guide. The published materials do not give the exact date on which the first neighbour moved in.

According to the museum’s history of the building, Tsvetaeva rented flat No. 3 from the heirs of I. K. Dmitriev. After the revolution, they lost their status as owners. But the change in ownership of the house and the occupation of individual rooms were separate events; no housing allocation order for the first neighbour has been published.

When the first additional residents moved in

On 20 August 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a decree abolishing private ownership of urban real estate. The date and title of the act are listed in the Electronic Library of Historical Documents. The decree provides the legal framework for the changes, but does not say who became the poet’s neighbours or when.

The city review of the exhibition describes the family’s moves within the flat: initially, Tsvetaeva and her children lived upstairs in Sergei Efron’s room while the lower rooms stood empty; after other people moved into the mezzanine rooms, they moved downstairs. The visitor guide independently confirms that the family spent the summers of 1918 and 1919 on the upper level and that neighbours had moved in there by the final year before her departure. The published sources do not give an exact date for the arrival of the first additional residents.

Among the housing documents on display, the city account of the exhibition specifically mentions a procedure that allowed residents to choose their own new neighbours. The existence of this procedure explains why intermediate steps could occur between a general decision to change housing rights and the occupation of a particular room. But the published account does not present an application by Tsvetaeva naming a neighbour of her choice. It is therefore impossible to state that she personally chose to invite the future occupants of the upper level. A rule, the opportunity to use it and a documented action by an individual must be distinguished here.

What did the change mean for Tsvetaeva’s everyday life?

The reduction in space coincided with severe material hardship for the family. Sergei Efron was serving in the Volunteer Army; Tsvetaeva remained in Moscow with her daughters, short of food and fuel. The museum’s visitor guide links the loss of their former way of life to changes in how the rooms were used: from 1920, daily life was largely concentrated in the dining room, where a small iron stove was used instead of the large fireplace.

The former reception area now served as a place both to eat and to work. According to the museum’s description, a table stood beside the stove, used for meals and for writing poetry; the fuel included wooden furniture that Tsvetaeva sawed up herself. This account should not be turned into a dramatic scene in which all the furnishings disappeared in a single day. The visitor guide describes a prolonged process of deterioration and dwindling possessions amid a shortage of fuel.

The museum’s list of furnishings helps us picture the pre-revolutionary dining room: glazed doors led in from the entrance hall, and beneath the skylight stood a round table and Empire-style mahogany chairs, with a large sideboard holding crockery nearby. Sofas stood against opposite walls, while a camel-shaped clock and a bronze bust of Alexander Pushkin sat on the mantelpiece of the onyx-clad fireplace. This description conveys the scale of the change after 1917: the formal room where the family had dined amid substantial furniture later became a living space centred on an iron stove. However, the visitor guide does not date the disappearance of each object or provide a precise inventory for 1920. The list of pre-revolutionary furnishings therefore cannot be treated as a list of the possessions Tsvetaeva still had in the final year before her departure.

A selection of documents displayed when the museum updated the memorial flat in 2022 recalls her literary work during those same difficult years. According to director Yulia Chursina, the writing-desk display included a fair-copy notebook from 1918–1919, a typescript of the collection ‘Youthful Poems’, prepared in 1920, and a reprint of the handmade book ‘Mariula’, produced for sale at the cooperative Writers’ Bookshop. These objects offer a more precise picture than the sweeping claim that hardship interrupted her creative work: she continued writing, although the collection was not published at the time. The reprint also attests to the existence of the original book and a way of earning money, but is not itself an object that lay on the desk in 1920.

Another concrete sign of the change is the grand piano in the music room. Tsvetaeva had inherited the instrument from her mother; in 1920, it was exchanged for a sack of rye flour. The grand piano visitors see in the museum recalls the original, but is not the same instrument. The distinction between an object from the family’s history and a museum exhibit is especially clear here.

The nursery also reveals the limitations of the familiar image of a ‘poet’s home’. Its pre-revolutionary furnishings almost entirely disappeared during the Civil War, and for a time the room could not be heated. In the nursery today, the museum identifies Tsvetaeva’s dressing table and mirror as the only surviving pieces of furniture from her time in this house. The other objects help evoke the family’s former way of life and social circle, but have different provenances.

In the summers of 1918 and 1919, Tsvetaeva and her children lived in Sergei Efron’s former room on the upper level. Other people later occupied that level. The layout thus becomes evidence: the family’s moves between the upper and lower parts of the flat can be established without speculating about their exact conversations with neighbours or the daily details of shared life.

The cold dining room as recalled by Boris Zaitsev

The writer Boris Zaitsev recalled bringing the poet firewood on a sledge and finding the rooms in her flat cold. He described a table beneath the skylight in the former dining room: a lamp was lit even in daylight, and Tsvetaeva was copying out a manuscript by Prince Sergei Volkonsky. According to Zaitsev’s recollection, the temperature in the room was around freezing. This is neither a log of measurements nor a record of temperatures throughout the flat over the winter; the value of this episode lies in the precise observation of everyday life by someone who entered the house with a sledge loaded with firewood.

Zaitsev’s account accords with the museum’s description of the dining room, where, from 1920 onwards, the family spent most of their time, warmed themselves by an iron stove and worked at a shared table. Two different sources describe the same change in the use of space: a former reception room became a place of daily survival. But Zaitsev does not give the exact date of the visit he describes, and some general details in his later recollection are inaccurate. This evidence cannot establish a consistent routine of sleeping, eating and working for the family over five years.

The museum’s visitor guide adds the back staircase to this picture. During the years of hardship, Tsvetaeva, by then without servants, carried firewood, water and food up it. This clarifies what a ‘large flat’ meant: only the rooms she could heat and look after herself were fit to live in.

What happened when Tsvetaeva left in 1922?

In May 1922, Tsvetaeva went abroad with Ariadna. By then, other people were already occupying part of the flat’s upper level, according to the museum’s visitor guide. The arrival of neighbours therefore preceded the poet’s emigration.

The museum’s visitor guide states that after Tsvetaeva’s departure, all the flats in the building became communal flats; the account of the building’s history specifies that this arrangement continued from the 1920s to the 1980s. These statements describe the building as a whole, rather than establishing an unbroken record of the occupants of each room. Between 1922 and the final decades of the Soviet era, the neighbours, the uses of the rooms and their finishes all changed.

The account of the exhibition includes another detail about her departure: Tsvetaeva left the belongings she could not take with her in a locked room and sent the key to her sister Anastasia. This explains why May 1922 should not be imagined as the moment when the entire flat was instantly cleared of the possessions she left behind. It does not, however, reveal what happened to each object after her departure. The museum’s visitor guide separately notes that the subsequent decades of alterations and occupation by numerous residents almost erased the traces of the former interior.

Who do the documents reveal as Tsvetaeva’s neighbours and the residents who came after her?

The exhibition and memoirs allow us to name some of Tsvetaeva’s neighbours and later residents of 6 Borisoglebsky Lane: Anastasia Rogachevskaya, the Kaltat family, Nikolai Kutler and Sergei Lemeshev. These people occupied different rooms at different times. The museum displays personal and official papers, household objects and photographs, but no complete list of residents by flat for 1917–1941 has been published in the publicly available material.

A city review of the exhibition names Anastasia Rogachevskaya, who moved into Tsvetaeva’s former room shortly after the poet emigrated. The author writes that details of her life and a photograph have yet to be found. This is true of the body of documents presented in the review, but there is another kind of testimony: the journalist Natalia Genina published a recollection of visiting the communal flat in the 1970s. She names the resident as Anastasia Ivanovna Rogachevskaya and recounts her story of working as a worker correspondent after the revolution. This is a later record of a personal encounter, rather than a verified personal file; it cannot establish exactly when she moved in, nor can it justify attributing every change in the flat to her.

Genina’s recollection reveals another aspect of the communal period: Rogachevskaya showed visitors Tsvetaeva’s former rooms, while the adjoining rooms remained home to other families. The author was able to see them only with the neighbours’ consent. This account dates from the 1970s, outside the exhibition’s period of 1917–1941, and helps explain why the flat that would become a museum remained ordinary shared accommodation for so long.

In the mid-1920s, the attic was home to conservatoire graduates Lev and Irina Kaltat, who worked in radio. The exhibition offers an impression of their small room, using pre-war objects from the museum’s collections. Here it is useful to distinguish information about the residents from the artistic interpretation of the display: a table or sideboard from the appropriate period helps visitors imagine everyday life, but does not in itself prove that those particular pieces belonged to the Kaltat family.

The economist Nikolai Kutler also lived at this address; the account of the exhibition links him to the monetary reform of 1922–1924 and states that he died in this building in 1924. It also mentions the future singer Sergei Lemeshev, who lived in Borisoglebsky Lane while studying at the Moscow Conservatoire. Number 6 comprised several buildings around a courtyard. Living on the same property therefore cannot automatically be taken to mean sharing a landing or living within Flat No. 3.

Residents’ accounts and archival documents

For the 2022 exhibition, the museum gathered objects, photographs and texts from sources beyond its own collections. Thanks were given for assistance to Tatyana Vinogradova, whose family lived in the building for almost half a century across three generations, and to Vitaly Kataev, who witnessed the struggle to preserve the building. The Central State Archive of the City of Moscow supplied documents for that project. The origins of these materials show how the history of the property is pieced together: an archival document, a family photograph and a later account preserve different parts of the past and warrant different degrees of trust.

What do the papers and objects in the exhibition tell us?

The exhibition ‘Flat No. 3 and Its Surroundings’ presents housing allocation documents, neighbours’ notices, household objects, propaganda materials and newspapers. This evidence helps reconstruct the rules of shared living and individual biographies of the building’s residents in 1917–1941. These materials do not provide a complete picture of every flat.

The account of the exhibition describes documents concerning changes in housing after 1918 and notices exchanged by neighbours: offers of services, items for sale and requests to buy. In the display, the courtyard is represented by a stylised fence bearing copies of these papers. This is a way of making visible the comings and goings between several buildings on one property, rather than a courtyard scene preserved unchanged from the 1920s.

The same account states that the museum marked the position of the kitchen stove and displayed hygiene posters beside the washbasin. Visitors can see where residents cooked and washed, and the standards of cleanliness they were reminded to observe. But the reconstructed stove area and the period poster each require an explanation. They do not automatically establish that this particular appeal for hygiene hung on the wall in Tsvetaeva’s time or that of the residents who followed her.

Information about the number of residents requires particular care. The exhibition account includes the example of a family living in difficult conditions in the basement of a neighbouring wing. This is evidence about the property at 6 Borisoglebsky Lane, rather than a description of a bedroom inside Flat No. 3. Reading it as the latter obscures the distinction between conditions in the neighbouring wing and the poet’s own daily life.

What in today’s museum has genuinely survived from that time?

The house retains some of its architectural fabric and features of its layout, but its present-day rooms are the result of successive alterations and restoration. According to the museum’s history of the building, the main staircase of white sandstone, with oak handrails and cast-iron balusters, has survived. In 1962, the decorative mouldings were stripped from the façade, the oak window frames and doors were replaced, and the parquet was covered with boards; the extension containing the nursery was demolished and rebuilt.

After the residents were rehoused, the building was adapted for use as a museum. According to the account of the reconstruction, the flat’s 1914 layout was restored, while other rooms were allocated to the archive, library and exhibition halls. The very need to restore the earlier layout reveals the scale of the changes made during the communal period. The museum opened in 1992.

This restoration also involved specific building work. According to the history of the house, the project for its research-based restoration and adaptation as a museum was prepared by Workshop No. 7 of the Spetsproektrestavratsiya Institute, led by the architect V. A. Rezvin. The internal partitions were rebuilt in asbestos concrete, and modern ventilation was installed in place of the former stove and fireplace ducts. The restored floor plan therefore represents a reconstructed arrangement of spaces, rather than authentic material in every wall. The surviving main staircase and the later partitions stand within the same building, but bear witness to different stages of its life.

The relationship between the flat’s layout and the visitor route needs a separate explanation. According to the museum’s visitor guide, the guest room and back staircase were opened to visitors for the first time; the guest room initially housed visitors and later servants. This shows how the exhibition opens up former service areas of the home, but says nothing about the survival of their finishes. Assessing authenticity requires information about the rebuilding of partitions and later renovations, rather than simply being able to walk through a room.

The white walls and restrained furnishings of the memorial rooms are a modern exhibition design choice. They help reveal the house’s complex architecture and individual surviving objects, but do not fully recreate the comfortable family flat, the impoverished home of the early 1920s or the communal flat of later decades. Each of these layers requires its own evidence.

Original objects and the reconstruction of the interior

The museum’s visitor guide allows the dining-room objects to be distinguished by their provenance. The display cabinet contains tableware from the Durnovo–Efron family, connected with Sergei Efron; beside it is a plate from a German hotel where Tsvetaeva stayed. A porcelain vase on a bronze base was found in the attic after the residents were rehoused. These are three different kinds of connection: family ownership, an object linked to the poet’s life and a find within the building. None on its own recreates the complete dining-room furnishings of 1914.

The museum received the large writing desk in Tsvetaeva’s room from the descendants of Mikhail Feldstein, a family friend; it resembles the lost desk given to the poet by her father. The octagonal table matches the one in Marina and Sergei’s wedding photograph, while the portrait of Efron is a copy of a lost painting by Magda Nachman. Applying the same word, ‘original’, to every exhibit would erase the differences in their provenance.

This distinction is even clearer in the nursery. The museum identifies Tsvetaeva’s dressing table and mirror as original furnishings from the house itself. The wardrobe and sleigh bed belonged to her sister Anastasia, the chest was donated by the Tarkovsky family, and some of the toys are reproductions. The wardrobe also holds a volume from Tsvetaeva’s personal library, with her initials on the spine. A single room brings together an original object from the flat, an object from her own family, a gift from another owner and a copy. This very juxtaposition shows why a surviving house does not mean a wholly surviving interior.

The provenance of the dressing table and mirror is known in greater detail than that of many other objects. In a 2022 interview, the museum’s director recounted the story of their return: the literary scholar Lev Mnukhin discovered the furniture in a village in the Dmitrov district, and signed postcards were found in a drawer. The museum holds these in its collections as evidence linking the objects to Tsvetaeva. Yulia Chursina attributes the account that an acquaintance, Nikolai Polenov, took the objects there before Tsvetaeva’s departure in 1922 to their previous custodians. The documentary trail and the oral account of the exhibits’ provenance carry different evidential weight. The nursery extension itself, however, where the objects are displayed to visitors, was demolished and rebuilt during the renovations of 1962.

In the same interview, the museum’s director said that the curtains in Tsvetaeva’s room had been recreated using a model made during the lifetime of her sister Anastasia. The new fabric both screens the windows from sunlight and helps visitors imagine the former interior. It is not surviving fabric from the 1910s. A single museum room thus brings together original objects, later accounts of their arrangement and modern measures to preserve the collection.

Why does the study end in 1941?

1941 marks the end of the period covered by the exhibition, rather than the date when the building's residents were rehoused. The building's history shows that communal flats remained here for decades afterwards, and the museum did not open until 1992. Focusing on 1917–1941 allows us to explore how a new way of life took shape without treating it as the whole of the building's subsequent history.

What happened to the house after 1941

The museum's account of the building's history traces several subsequent changes to its utilities. Gas was installed in 1948, and central heating replaced stove heating in the mid-1950s. The kitchen and the flat's heating arrangements therefore could not have been the same in the 1930s, the 1950s and the museum displays. The position of the kitchen stove marked in the exhibition relates to the pre-war period, rather than the building's entire Soviet history.

According to the museum's booklet about Nadezhda Katayeva-Lytkina, a final decision to demolish the house was taken in 1979. Residents were being evicted, but she refused to leave and fought to save it. The published chronology records that the Nekrasov Library leased the empty building in 1986; in 1990, the Soviet Cultural Foundation resolved to establish a cultural centre, and the museum opened in 1992. This later sequence of events explains why the archive and surviving possessions can be studied in the building itself, although the years of communal living and renovation work had almost entirely destroyed the original interior.

The history of Flat No. 3 can be read on several levels at once: Tsvetaeva's family, the rooms, the neighbours, the four buildings around the courtyard and the housing records. It is established that, by the time the poet left, other people were already occupying part of the upper level, and that the whole house subsequently became communal housing for many years. Publicly available museum materials do not establish the exact dates when each new household moved in or provide a complete list of residents. Distinguishing between confirmed facts and gaps in the record makes the account of the house more precise.

You can see the house described in these documents on the ‘Secrets of the Arbat’ tour: the route passes the Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum in Borisoglebsky Lane. The exhibition requires a separate visit; other individual excursions in Moscow are listed on the bureau's website.

Sources

1. ‘Flat No. 3 and Its Surroundings’ Exhibition | Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum
2. History of the House | Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum
3. Visitor Guide to Marina Tsvetaeva’s Memorial Flat
4. Memorial Flat | Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum
5. The Mark Left by a Sign, or An Invitation to the Museum | Natalia Genina
6. Where Tsvetaeva Lived. A Visit to the ‘Flat No. 3’ Exhibition | Capital Region News
7. Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee abolishing private ownership of urban real estate. 20 August 1918 | EBID
8. My Home! (The House in Borisoglebsky Lane) | Anastasia Tsvetaeva. Memoirs
9. Boris Zaitsev. ‘The Distant Past’ (1965 edition)
10. ‘A House with an Extraordinary Fate’ Exhibition | Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum
11. Interview with Yulia Chursina, Director of the Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum | Vechernyaya Moskva
12. Secrets of the Arbat | Radius
13. Radius — private tours
14. ‘A Doctor and a Bit of a Poet’: Nadezhda Kataeva-Lytkina | Marina Tsvetaeva House Museum
15. Lev Lvovich Kaltat | Music Academy
16. Sergei Yakovlevich Lemeshev | Moscow Conservatory
17. Narovchat Encyclopaedia: Irina Kaltat
18. Nine whole rooms. What secrets does the house where Marina Tsvetaeva lived hold? | Argumenty i Fakty