­At the hour of the hot spring sunset, two citizens appeared at Patriarch's Ponds: me and my friend who helped me take the pictures.

Mikhail Bulgakov house

­The destination is the so-called Mikhail Bulgakov house – the incarnation of the sinister apartment where much of the action of The Master and Margarita took place several decades ago. In order to find the place you need to arrive at Mayakovskaya Metro station in the very heart of the busy city and…slip into a tiny archway that is almost imperceptible from the street.

The apartment inside the house is a large, five-room flat

­­What you see there is a neat porch, a tidy bench under a streetlamp and two most suspicious bronze figures – one of an immensely fat cat and the other of a tall unpleasant man in a checkered suit. And this is where magic begins.

Part of the exhibition is dedicated to Bulgakov’s medical and literary career

­The house was opened in 2004 by enthusiasts, art patrons and plain-old Bulgakov lovers. The apartment inside the house is a large, five-room flat where numerous photographs, showpieces and other most peculiar things are available for visitors to admire absolutely for free.

One of the wide corridors of the apartment is occupied by…a tram standing on rails!

­Part of the exhibition is dedicated to Bulgakov’s medical and literary career – there are syringes and other medical instruments from the hospital he worked at, books and document cases, a few personal possessions and just trifles like a table-lamp or a vase. There are also several hundred photographs of the writer and his family, as well as numerous posters and placards announcing performances based on Bulgakov’s books that have been staged in Moscow theaters.

An old-fashioned telephone, with a telephone-book attached with Voland’s and Gella’s numbers in it

­The walls are covered with pictures depicting different scenes from the novel The Master and Margarita; each picture is accompanied by a quotation from the book written in an elegant italic under the frame.

An old gramophone

­One of the wide corridors of the apartment is occupied by…a tram standing on rails! And one of the walls has a huge built-in mirror. Every now and then visitors seem to become embraced by weird little objects that allude to the novel. An old-fashioned telephone, with a telephone-book attached with Voland’s and Gella’s numbers in it; an enormous mirror; a gramophone; a fireplace; a piano with a dusty lid; a gramophone; or a primus heater.

An old-fashioned piano with a dusty lid

­Near the entrance one can notice a small letter-box with a tiny plate saying “For Master”. When I was hurriedly cramming my letter inside, careful not to be noticed by others, it felt like mine was far from being the only one in the box.

There is a big fireplace at the museum

­The museum (or whatever the place should officially be called) has a roomy canteen where prices are indicated in kopecks, and pear-flavored soda water is served. Chairs are upholstered with red velvet, and so are the lampshades, placed cozily on every little round table. Dozens of bookshelves are lined up along the walls as though boasting colorful backs with golden letters printed on them.

A primus heater

­The museum has a chamber theater that stages Bulgakov’s novels either on a small stage at the backyards of the museum if the weather is nice and warm, or behind a heavy velvet curtain in one of the spacious apartment rooms.

Dozens of bookshelves are lined up along the walls

­A number of professional guides, historians and literary scholars organize day and night excursions. For a moderate fee they will take you to all the places that have traditionally been associated with The Master and Margarita and other novels. Night tours are especially popular on stuffy summer nights.

Near the entrance one can notice a small letter-box with a tiny plate saying “For Master”.

And if you’re lucky, you may even see a corpulent charcoal-black cat slipping from one museum room to another, giving you suspicious looks that are way too intelligent for an average Moscow black cat. But I could have invented all that. After all, strange things may occur to you at the hour of the hot spring sunset in this sinister apartment…