Mapped
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil comes to atheist Soviet Moscow and turns it inside out. The map runs through the real city Bulgakov wrote from: a bench by Patriarch's Ponds, the writers' club drawn from Herzen House on Tverskoy Boulevard, and the haunted flat modelled on his own rooms on Bolshaya Sadovaya. A second thread, Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem, runs outside the city as a story within the story.
6 places →
The White Guard
Mikhail Bulgakov
The winter of 1918–19 in Kyiv, as the German-backed Hetmanate collapses and Petliura's Ukrainian nationalists close on the City, seen through the Turbin family and their friends, officers of a cause already lost. Bulgakov maps his own Kyiv: the family house on the steep Andriyivskyy Descent, the gymnasium where the volunteers muster, the shops and panic of the centre, the Golden Gate and St Sophia, and the Dnieper down which the beaten forces retreat.
5 places →