When I travelled in Russia one of my priorities was going on a literary walking tour in Moscow because I have a great love for Russian fiction.
So with a bit of research I made up a literary tour of Moscow, which is focused mainly in the leafy quarter southwest of Tverskaya.
The photo above is of a peaceful little park where I started my walking tour. It’s called the Patriarch’s Ponds and this is where the opening scene of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is set. Here the mysterious Woland warns two literary hacks sitting on a park bench “at the hour of the hot spring sunset” that one of them will die soon.
It wasn’t sunset but early morning and I surprised the green-overalled street cleaners busy transforming Moscow from a rubbish-cluttered mess into a pristine Russian city.
Nearby on Bolshaya Sadovaya ulitsa is the apartment where Bulgakov lived in Moscow, which has now been made into a small museum. The satirical writer never saw his masterpiece published, being blacklisted by Stalin. The exterior is rather plain, apart from this at the doorway:
Next on my Moscow literary walking tour was a pink two-storied building on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya. Anton Chekhov lived here for 24 years and managed a prolific output of stories and plays (as well as letters discussing his very active sex life) while practising as a doctor. The house has been turned into a museum.
Much grander, and an architectural site in its own right, is the Gorky House Museum. The Ryabushinsky mansion was built in Moscow by a pre-revolution millionaire and is an Art Nouveau gem awash with delicate mosaics, curving walls and wrought iron curlicues.
Despite criticising the Stalinist regime, Gorky was installed here in 1931 and the weight of ‘social realism’ hung about his neck. It is difficult to imagine him writing a revolutionary novel like his famous 1906 work The Mother once ensconced here under the watchful eyes of the NKVD.
In Nikitsky Boulevard a museum honours the memory of Nikolai Gogol. You can see where he flung a manuscript of one of my favourite Russian novels – Dead Souls – into the fireplace in a fit of depression. There’s also a very sad looking monument.
At Nikitsky Gate there is a statue of Pushkin and Natalya Goncharova in the park outside the yellow Church of Feodor Studit where they were wed. The figures are almost dancing inside the collonades. I loved wandering around this area and it would be a perfect place to stay in Moscow.
To take you deeper into Moscow’s bourgeois days, just a little further on is leafy Tverskoy Boulevard, a famous 18th century promenading street. This is where the fictional Kitty Scherbatsky – Anna’s defeated rival for Vronsky’s affections in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – and her sister take their afternoon walks accompanied by a footman in a gilded cockade.
Now it’s more likely to be women clipping along in Zara shoes. How Moscow has changed!
By Natasha von Geldern
As well as following my Moscow literary walking tour, another way to get up close to the Russian literary greats is to visit their graves at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
I love places with literary tours. Have you got any to recommend?
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