ARTSITe

Gillian McIver

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The House on Sadovaya Street

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The House on Sadovaya Street was made at the former flat of Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The flat, on Bolshaya Sadovaya in Moscow, was the setting for his masterpiece novel, The Master and Margarita. The novel was not published in the Soviet Union during Bulgakov's lifetime. When it was finally published in parts, during the late 1970s and 80s, it caused a sensation in Russia. The flat, which is in an ordinary block of flats off a main road, became a kind of shrine to the youth, nascent counterculture and artistic dissidents of the Soviet Union. Many young people simply came to the flat just to hang abut in the corridor where the Master had lived. Gradually the walls, floor, ceilings of the building's corridors were covered in graffiti, to the consternation of the residents who occupied the other flats. However this was no ordinary graffiti - almost all of it consisted of quotations and painting of characters from the book , such as the wonderful cat, Behemoth, the devil Woland and his henchmen, and the heroine Margarita.

Finally, soon after this video footagwe was shot the interior of the building was repainted and all the paintings and graffiti were eliminated.

from "Places" DVD 2005