Armenian Families of the Bulgakov House: A Microhistorical Anthropology Approach

The presentation explores the history of several Armenian families who lived in a Moscow apartment building constructed in 1904 and known above all as Mikhail Bulgakov’s first Moscow address and as the residence of Woland in The Master and Margarita. Yet the history of the building extends far beyond the writer’s biography and fictional world.

Armenian families were connected with the house throughout the twentieth century—from pre-revolutionary tenants, including a bank employee, a physician, and a noble family, to Soviet-era residents such as artists, NEP-era entrepreneurs, and members of the Yerevan intelligentsia. The house was linked to a broad Armenian geography: Yerevan, Tbilisi, Akhalkalaki, Kizlyar, and Nakhichevan-on-Don.

The aim of the presentation is not so much to recount the biographies of these families—although this is unavoidable—as to explore the possibilities and limitations of microhistorical anthropology as an interdisciplinary approach. The sources include interviews with descendants, documents and photographs from private archives, materials from state archives, previously unknown ego-texts, as well as published fiction and documentary literature.

How was Soviet housing policy reflected in the biographies of individual families? How did the hierarchy of Soviet regions manifest itself in their migration trajectories? Can we speak of an Armenian community within a single apartment building in the very centre of Moscow? What role did networks based on shared regional origins play in the everyday practices and housing strategies of Moscow Armenians? And, finally, what can such a detailed immersion in the biographies of individual families contribute to our understanding of the city and to the anthropology of the house?

Dmitriy Oparin is an anthropologist, a former research fellow at the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, and an associate member of the Passages research centre (Bordeaux) and GSRL (Paris).

Photo: The Avetisyants family. Moscow, 1913. From the personal archive of Narine Hovhannisyan