Moscow will finally unveil a monument to Soviet author Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived in the city and set many of his scenes among its landmarks, after the project was delayed for more than a decade as a “sign of devildom”.



Nikolai Golubev, director of the Bulgakov House museum and theatre, said earlier this month that the city’s monument preservation department had approved his request to place a bronze sculpture of the author in downtown Moscow. He said he plans to gather the necessary funds and install the monument in May.

The author has “always been surrounded by superstition and mysticism,” Golubev said when asked why it has taken so long to put up a Bulgakov monument in Moscow. He now believes his museum and the 2,000-plus signatures it collected in support of the monument have dispelled the misperception that Bulgakov was a “satanist”.

“It’s hard for people to forgive Bulgakov for the fact that in his novel evil is committed by humans, not the devil,” Golubev said. “We managed to convey this finally to society.”

Bulgakov’s classic novel The Master and Margarita centres on the arrival of a strange foreigner named Professor Woland, usually interpreted to be the devil, in Soviet-era Moscow, a development that eventually brings together the fates of an imprisoned author, his muse Margarita, and Pontius Pilate.

The opening scene, in which Woland tells literary official Mikhail Berlioz that his head will be cut off later that day, takes place at the southeast corner of Patriarch’s Ponds in downtown Moscow and the monument will be installed here.

Due to Soviet censorship, Bulgakov had difficulty publishing his works before he died in 1940, and the novel was only published in full in 1973. It was only added to the Russian school curriculum in the late 1990s.

The Bulgakov monument has gone through similar difficulties. Alexander Rukavishnikov, who previously sculpted a monument to Russian émigré author Vladimir Nabokov in Montreux, Switzerland, won a city government competition to build a Bulgakov monument in 1998. But his expansive design, which was to feature the author looking at Jesus as he walked across Patriarch’s Ponds, along with other Master and Margarita characters, provoked a public outcry.

The most contentious part of the ensemble was a giant primus stove with a bas-relief of the devil and his helpers. An open letter against the monument called it a “sign of devildom” and in 2003 the city cancelled all the elements besides the statue of Bulgakov himself and the city canceled the project even though Rukavishnikov had already cast most of the elements.

In 2004, local authorities decided to install the monument at Sparrow Hills, another part of Moscow but this was also blocked after the Russian Orthodox Church said that plague victims had been buried in the area in previous times.

“The idea of installing this monument on a mass grave is something in the spirit of Woland’s tricks and indicates that there is still havoc in people’s heads,” Boris Danilov, director of the Synodal Library of the Moscow Patriarchate, said at the time.

The Moscow government renamed a square near Patriarch’s Ponds in honour of Bulgakov last month and a city parliament session this week will discuss the monument. Although the city has approved the Bulgakov statue, which shows the author sitting on a broken bench, Golubev is still seeking permission to have the other characters from the ensemble installed at various points along the route between the pond and his museum. He is trying to raise 40-50 million roubles (£500,000) for this “Bulgakov path” project.

“Life is short, art is long … Bulgakov didn’t have children, his children are his books. We want to put up a monument to these works, which will outlast me and you,” Golubev said.

Svetlana Brezhneva, who teaches Russian literature in a school in the Moscow suburb of Troitsk, was visiting Bulgakov House on Sunday with two of her students. The museum was crowded with people of all ages, including dozens of students taking part in a Bulgakov quiz competition.

“They absolutely must put up a monument, and Patriarch’s Ponds is the right place to do it,” she said. “Look at how packed the museum is.”

Brezhneva said the view of Bulgakov as a satanist was erroneous and should not derail the project. “I’m an Orthodox believer, and there are not devils in the religious sense in Bulgakov’s works,” she said. “There are allegories. Many have written that Woland represents the Soviet authorities.”