The Stove on Pirogovskaya: What Bulgakov Burnt in His Flat

In the flat at 35a Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, the current museum exhibition gives special prominence to the study: it contains five tables designed for reading Bulgakov’s texts. One of the key documents associated with this address is Bulgakov’s letter to the government of 28 March 1930. In it, the writer referred to the destroyed manuscript by the description he used at the time: ‘a novel about the devil’.

On the tour route through Khamovniki this flat is one of the stops. The address in the letter offers a precision rare in literary history: ‘Moscow, Pirogovskaya, 35-a, flat 6’. Bulgakov had lived here since 1927. Here he worked on what would become the novel, and here, by his own admission, he threw its draft into the stove.

At first glance, everyone knows the story: Bulgakov burned The Master and Margarita. This brief formulation loses an important detail. The title by which we know the novel did not yet exist; nor did the final text familiar to readers. What burned were pages from an early conception of the work. Their fate became part of the book’s history, but they were not yet the finished book.

The Novel Before Its Familiar Title

The first version of The Master and Margarita took shape in this very flat. Work began no later than the spring of 1929. The exact month is unknown: on later title pages, the author himself gave either 1928 or 1929. We do, however, know the day on which part of the text left the flat: on 8 May 1929, Bulgakov submitted the fourth chapter to the editors of the literary anthology Nedra.

It was already a substantial work. According to Marietta Chudakova’s description, the first notebook contained fifteen chapters on one hundred and sixty leaves. In it, a stranger appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds and spoke with Berlioz and a poet; the storyline involving Yeshua and the procurator was already present. Yet the book’s structure and characters differed markedly from those of the later novel. Anyone looking in these early pages for the whole familiar story of the master and Margarita is looking for a book that had yet to come into being.

One version of the opening followed another. The poet’s name changed, as did the chapter titles and the way the story was told. The surviving notebooks reveal how the early conception developed, but they do not allow us to reconstruct the contents of the particular manuscript Bulgakov threw into the stove.

Ten Days in March

March brought another closed door in Bulgakov’s theatrical career. In his letter, he gives the exact date: on 18 March, Glavrepertkom, the central repertoire committee, informed him that his new play, The Cabal of Hypocrites, had not been approved for performance. The play had been written, but for the time being its path to the stage was blocked. The official notice concerned his work as a playwright; in response, the writer also spoke of his novel. The fire in the study falls between these two documents: the refusal and the letter of 28 March.

In his lengthy appeal, Bulgakov lists the press responses: by his count, of 301 reviews of his work, three were favourable. He recalls the bans and challenges the way he is portrayed in public. At the end of this list comes a line about his own action: ‘And I personally, with my own hands, threw the draft of a novel about the devil into the stove.’ Alongside it, he mentions the draft of a comedy and the beginning of a second novel, Theatre. The destruction of several manuscripts was recorded in a single document.

The letter helps us understand why Bulgakov burned the early manuscript of The Master and Margarita only within the limits of what he himself said. For him, the ban on the new play signalled that his future work would find no place either: he writes of past, present and future works as lost. This was one man’s judgement on a particular day in March, rather than a final verdict on the novel. His words were addressed to the authorities, but described the disruption of his own creative work.

What Remained of the Pages

The date of the burning can be narrowed down to the interval between news of the ban on 18 March and the letter of 28 March. Beyond that, scholars’ accounts diverge. Chudakova relayed a later account by Elena Bulgakova: the manuscript was supposedly destroyed while the letter was being written, and parts of the leaves were deliberately kept. Elena Sergeyevna was not yet the writer’s wife at the time.

Lydia Yanovskaya, who studied the same early notebooks, disagreed. In her view, the pattern of tears and revisions showed that pages had been removed at different times; the surviving notebooks might have been earlier drafts rather than remnants of the particular text that went into the stove. This is a dispute about the provenance of the papers. The burning itself is confirmed by Bulgakov’s letter, and he later mentioned it again in a letter to Vikenty Veresayev.

On one leaf, part of a line survived; on another, an entire chapter. Of some pages, only narrow strips remained beside the spine. A textual scholar reads the torn fragments as a sequence of decisions: where the author crossed something out, where he rewrote it, where he returned to the beginning. Yet even a close reading of the early notebooks cannot provide a precise picture of how the manuscript burned in March 1930.

The destruction was not the final point in the letter to the government. Bulgakov asked for permission to go abroad with his wife, Lyubov Yevgenyevna. If that was impossible, he asked for work in his profession, as a theatre director. His list of possible positions extended as far as an extra or a stagehand. The sentence about the stove is followed by pleas for the chance to work again; our reading of the document must not stop there.

In those years, Bulgakov shared the flat on Pirogovskaya with Lyubov Belozerskaya. Her place in the history of the early novel goes beyond a detail of family biography: some pages in the surviving draft notebooks are in her handwriting, taken down at the writer’s dictation. She later recalled readings of parts of the novel to friends. These accounts show that work on the text was a long process, heard by others, though they shed no further light on that moment in March.

And yet pages remained. Chudakova was able to read individual chapters in the damaged notebooks and suggest reconstructions of missing portions of lines. Her textual reconstruction is a scholarly work, complete with annotations and conjectures. It reveals the structure of the early conception: the novel had its own introduction, its own arrangement of characters, its own narrative pace. Even scenes familiar to later readers occupied a different place then.

Room for the Words to Come

After March, the novel did not disappear from the author’s life. New sketches appeared in the drafts of 1931: a scene at Griboyedov House, the reflections of the poet Ryukhin, the outlines of what would become Woland’s flight. Some episodes are written out in full, while others exist only as brief notes. Once again, the work proceeded in fragments. The earlier text was not being rewritten page by page: the narrative was searching anew for its form.

In August 1933, Bulgakov wrote to Veresayev that he was writing anew the novel he had destroyed three years earlier. This later testimony from the author himself links the burning to the continuation of his work. Between the March letter and the August report lay new notebooks, new chapters and a different structure for the book. Keeping the idea alive required pages, time and a fresh start.

Today, the museum on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya tells the story of the letter in the place where it was written. The exhibition includes the study and a separate room centred on the appeal to the government; the original layout has changed over the intervening decades. The present furnishings do not amount to an untouched interior from that March. The address on the document connects the paper to the place more precisely than the museum setting does.

Bulgakov was still living on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya when the beginning of a sentence appeared in a notebook of 1931: ‘Margarita began to speak passionately: —’. The words she was to say are absent from the page. After the account of the burned draft, the narrative was once again leaving room for the words to come.

Sources

1. Mikhail Bulgakov Museum. Permanent Exhibition in the Flat on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya
2. Mikhail Bulgakov Museum. Bulgakov’s Birthday Anniversary to Be Celebrated in the Writer’s New Flat
3. M. A. Bulgakov. Letter to the Government of the USSR, 28 March 1930
4. M. O. Chudakova. The Creative History of the Novel ‘The Master and Margarita’
5. L. M. Yanovskaya. ‘And I myself, with my own hands...’