Mapping Memory

In the Soviet imagination, Moscow was meant to be the total embodiment of the state ideals. In its urbanism, the party sought to boast collectivism, rational order and ideological uniformity and establish the capital as the ideal of Soviet city planning. The city’s streets, housing blocks, and communal apartments were designed not only to organize social life but also to mold the Soviet citizens’ experiences in hopes of making them align with the state’s utopian vision of urban life. Urban space was not neutral; it was central to the project of creating the “New Soviet Man.” Yet beneath this planned rationality lay a city shaped by sentiment, memory, and imagination, forces far less predictable and controllable than Soviet planners had accounted for. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, written in the Stalinist period between 1928-1940 but unpublished until decades later, transforms Moscow into a layered, emotionally charged landscape where both personal and collective memory, as well as imaginative reappropriation of space, challenge the state’s spatial and ideological claims.

This paper argues that Bulgakov’s Moscow functions as a “sentimental city,” taking from Andy Merrifield’s theory that a city is experienced primarily through memory and emotion rather than through its official meanings. People’s navigation of the ideologically rigid spaces of the Soviet regime was shaped by personal history. Courtyards, communal apartments, and public spaces were imbued with these histories. Drawing on Caroline Humphrey’s concept of ideological refraction, the essay explores how built spaces designed to project collectivist ideals were subjugated and infused with private meaning by the inhabitants. Jessica Merrill’s analysis of Stalinist subjectivity further explores how the contradictory demands placed upon Soviet citizens, to be both self-disciplined individuals and submissive subjects, are reflected in the novel’s treatment of spatial experience.

In The Master and Margarita, the characters traverse Bulgakov’s Moscow in completely erratic and unexplainable ways which reveal the limits of state control, at all scales of the urban life, and a view of the city as a place of adventure, memory, and resistance. The novel, among its other agendas, seems to get at the question of whether sentimentality can exist within socialist urbanism.

Before I dive deeper into an analysis of the novel, I would like to first go over some theoretical frameworks. Andy Merrifield’s concept of the “sentimental city” will provide the foundation for understanding how Bulgakov’s Moscow repositions urban space as something shaped not by top-down planning, but by the lived, often improvised and grassroots ways people traverse their environments. Spatial meanings arise from the characters’ disrupted trajectories and by the reassignment of space in both horizontal and vertical directions which undermine the imposed spatial hierarchies (both in the novel and in the Soviet Union). This spatial disorder creates a mapping of the city which relies not on direction and organization, but on the characters’ experiences, in other words, a sort of experiential mapping. Caroline Humphrey writes about refraction where even the most prescriptive Soviet spaces such as courtyards, bureaucratic offices, and communal apartments were rarely experienced in accordance with their planned social purpose. Rather than simply resisting state control, residents developed complex, situational uses of space that blurred the lines between compliance and subversion. Perhaps the most famous historical example that comes to mind is the Narkomfin building in Moscow built by Moisei Ginzburg in 1932. An experiment in creating a social condenser housing complex, with a variety of communal spaces designed to limit the individual apartments’ use to solely sleeping and to begin the breakdown of the nuclear family, its intended uses quickly fell into disrepair. Instead of using the communal kitchens, residents swiftly installed makeshift kitchens in their tiny apartments and the rooftop, initially designed as a recreation space, was transformed into an apartment for the commissar of finance(https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/moscow-narkomfin-soviet-collective-li ving-history-cities-50-buildings). In Bulgakov’s narrative, similarly, space is assigned not just private meaning, but its meanings are constantly renegotiated under shifting political, social, and even supernatural conditions. For example, apartment №50 at 302-bis on Sadovaya Street, which initially is just Berlioz’s residence, shifts from a Soviet kommunalka, to a site of bureaucratic control, to a surreal supernatural hub as Woland and his entourage overtake it. The apartment eventually disappears entirely. Jessica Merrill’s analysis of Stalinist subjectivity also offers an interesting connection between the novel’s spatial instability and the psychological landscape of the 1930s USSR. The dual expectation of being autonomous “agents” of Soviet morality while fully submitting to the authority and judgment of the state created fractured identities can be used to explore how Bulgakov’s characters relate to space (Merrill, 294). Their disoriented movements across Moscow and beyond, which will be discussed at length later on, reflect not just spatial confusion but psychological instability, quite literally making dozens of characters go crazy in the novel.

Unlike in many more traditional novels where the plot takes place against a static setting, aimed at orienting the reader, in The Master and Margarita the backdrop is anything but static. Moscow in this case is a completely unstable environment where spatial meanings shift as characters move through and reinterpret the city. Many physical spaces become contested sites of negotiation between different power dynamics, from the institutional to the individual and most notably, the supernatural. The traditional dichotomy between private versus public completely fades away to reveal many new readings of space. A crucial and recurring site is the dvor, or courtyard, an architecturally modest yet social complex feature of Soviet urbanism. Typically imagined as a transitional space between the private and communal, it becomes a site of constant instability. In chapter 4, Ivan Bezdmony flees Patriarch’s Ponds in pursuit of Woland’s entourage and this chase leads him to jumping into the Moscow River from which he emerges almost naked. Still early in the novel, the city appears to be functioning in the “right” way while Ivan is the deviation. Bulgakov describes apartment life happening around a courtyard, where in “every windsor a light burned under an orange lampshade, and from every window, every door, every gateway, roof, and attic, basement blared the hoarse roar of the polonaise…”(Bulgakov, 65), an evening scene where all is in order and identical. Ivan, realizing that he is half-naked and passers-by are turning their heads, decides to “leave the main streets and make his way through back lanes”(Bulgakov, 65) where he knows people to be less adhering to the norm. Here then, the city is still quite static and operates as a panopticon, and Ivan has to find ways to manoeuvre around and evade this spatial organization. Now compare this to the scene in chapter 30, where the Master and Margarita are leaving Moscow once and for all and running out of their basement flat. Now, it seems, the characters are in control and the backdrop, on the other hand, descends into complex chaos. The room is lit on fire and as they come up to the yard, “the first thing they [see] there was the landlord’s cook sitting on the ground. Beside her lay spilled potatoes and several bunches of onions”(Bulgakov, 379). The courtyard is no longer a scene of surveillance and in fact, it is devoid of people (apart from the cook) and becomes instead a site of rupture and transformation. The spilled potatoes symbolize this departure point into disorder at the scale of everyday life, while the group’s subsequent supernatural flight indicates a sort of transcendence. Interestingly enough too, the cook “wanted to raise her hand to make the sign of the cross”(Bulgakov, 379). It seems that the Soviet spatial fabric had been ruptured so much that even a religious sign makes an appearance as the only suitable response to the situation (keep in mind the strict atheism of the USSR in the 1930s). While Ivan had to find hidden ways to navigate the space in an abnormal way, the end of the novel shows how there is no longer a way to exist in Moscow in a “normal” sense–a complete spatial destabilization. The experiences of the city and the collective memory of its people throughout the novel completely shift the urban logic of Moscow. The end of the novel sees the rest of the characters pondering over whether all of the supernatural occurrences were real, but the state concludes that everything that had happened was merely mass hypnosis. Yet through this change in the urban experience, we see that even when a certain narrative (or ideology) is put out, the collective memory and imagination, a sort of urban sentimentality, proves to be more powerful in shaping city life. Even when people don’t “believe,” their memory persists and state-imposed meaning falters.

As the Master and Margarita progresses, Moscow shifts from a legible, controlled city into an emotionally saturated landscape where past, present and imagination converge. This evolution mirrors Andy Merrifield’s conception of the “sentimental city” where “tragedy often mingles with the familiar odors of the street. Misery plunges everybody and everything into an infinitely mysterious mist that permits the imagination”(Merrifield, 933). This is a particularly potent view for our analysis since the novel is full of tragic situations. At first, rational urban order still holds. Berlioz’s death in chapter 3 is caused by a tramcar, a symbol of urban infrastructure functioning according to state planning, and one of the most important, and rigid, urban mechanisms of the USSR. The tram operates correctly, and it is Annushka’s spilled oil that causes Berlioz to slip and fall under the train. While the tram’s mechanical regularity implies that Moscow’s physical and ideological frameworks remain superficially intact, his death is the first rupture in Moscow’s visible order. It serves as an almost a foreshadowing to the emotional and imaginative forces about to ensue as a result of the intrusion of the completely inexplicable, supernatural force that is Woland, which not even the state could control. Ivan’s chase, and his deviation from the rational pathways imposed on him by the city, too is an example of the breakdown of the grid.

A key moment of spatial transformation occurs during Margarita’s night flight in chapter 21, when she first turns into a witch. As she soars over Moscow, Margarita observes a fragmented cityscape, seeing “patched up, darned, crooked and long lanes”(Bulgakov, 247), and with her fascination, she barely misses a collision with a street light. This splintered horizontal movement seems to reflect Margarita’s excitement of not just becoming a witch, but also of finally being able to be free from the grid of both Moscow’s streets and ideology (since she had suffered so much after the Master’s book was censored by the Massolit). Soon, her flight transcends the street level and her freedom takes on a vertical component. Entering Arbat (an iconic Moscow street) on her broom, she becomes quickly disoriented, “dodging between the wires”(248) and strikes “her shoulder against some illuminated disc with an arrow on it”(Bulgakov, 247). While her broom is still described as “obedient”(Bulgakov, 247), she says that on the Arbat, “everything’s a snarl here, you can’t figure it out!”(Bulgakov, 247-248) Above the carefully planned street level, the rational grid seems to disappear and collapse into a tangled maze, perhaps pointing at the fact that Soviet planning only worked at the surface-level but crumbled at any sort of divergence (such as at the level of the flight). Margarita’s crash into what seems to be a street sign, a symbol of the state effort to impose order and signage onto the urban landscape, reflects the incompatibility between the city’s physical structure and the often unpredictable, improvised ways in which residents navigate it. But even in her discombobulation, Margarita does not merely recoil but transforms her initial confusion into a sort of agency, deliberately smashing the sign into “smithereens”(Bulgakov, 247), after which she bursts out laughing. Such an act, which she herself deems “unnecessary”(Bulgakov, 247) is a spontaneous gesture of a sort of defiance through redefinition. Flying higher and higher, she exclaims “eh, what a mess!”(Bulgakov, 248) at the city on this larger scale. As Merrifield writes, the “urban unconscious” in the sentimental city “illuminates its nocturnal depths”(Merrifield, 939), offering moments where official urban meaning is disrupted by affective, improvised responses, imbuing the city with a completely new perspective (here literally, from a bird’s eye view). Perhaps we can even read the scattering of the smithereens to reflect Caroline Humphrey’s view of the capability of the built construction in acting as a prism of “gathering meanings and scattering them again, yet not randomly”(Humphrey, 11).

Humphrey’s theory clarifies how this process unfolds. While Soviet planners sought to create functional, collectivist spaces, Humphrey argues that the structures and surfaces of the built environment became “reflectors that deflected it [conceptual worlds of the Soviet people] and made it swerve aside”(Humphry, 2). Soviet infrastructure was never actually experienced in a uniform, top-down fashion, and instead deflected the imaginative life of the citizens. The tangled wires, crooked lanes, and confusing signage that Margarita encounters reflect this very deflection. While designed to organize Moscow, these material structures instead confront her with a disjointed, disorganized reality that cannot fully contain the ideology behind its construction. Everyone must contend with the complexity of the city’s accumulated meanings, even those who try to function beyond its constraints.

Woland’s apartment #50 is also an interesting example of this re-mapping of space. Initially a communal flat, a symbol of Soviet ideals on domesticity and surveillance, it becomes a completely unstable, surreal environment where the authorities repeatedly lose all possibilities of control. When Margarita first enters and is shocked by her experience in the space, Koroviev explains that “for someone well acquainted with the fifth dimension, it costs nothing to expand space to the desired proportions”(Bulgakov, 262). Yet he also goes on to say that he knows people who without access to the fifth dimension, “nevertheless performed absolute wonders in expanding their space”(Bulgakov, 262), and gives the example of a three-room apartment which was transformed into a four-room apartment with nothing but an extra wall. Such an expansion, or rather this possibility, is what Humphrey describes as a site of negotiation between official functions and personal, emotional significance. The supernatural reconfiguration of Woland’s apartment satirizes how Soviet citizens often manipulated their living spaces and subverted collectivist constraints for private needs and fantasies. People did not just inhabit material structures as intended, but rather projected private meaning onto them, sometimes as resistance and sometimes as pure necessity. As Humphrey notes, even in Russian memoirs we see how communal buildings had meaning and effects that were both “specific to them” and “at the same time refracted outwards to the very horizon of the ideologized imagination”(Humphrey, 3). Yet even despite Koroviev’s belief that such an expansion was available to all, this imaginative navigation was indeed not equally accessible. Merrill observes that Stalinist citizens lived within fractured subjectivities and introduces a quote by Anna Krylova, which says that their “reasoning abilities, self-understanding, and perceptions of the outside world are circumscribed by a particular historical dynamics, often traumatic and undermining for the self”(Merrill, 310). While Margarita, Woland and his entourage, and the Master navigate, reshape and thus exert a certain power over the reconfigured city, characters like Ivan, those most affected by the happenings, remain trapped (literally in the psych ward and metaphysically) within this collapsing rational order, unable to access these new imaginative dimensions. Yet despite this inability to escape the order, Ivan nonetheless redefines his own space as he continues to be influenced by his supernatural encounters, which stay with him from the hospital, into the street and up to his own apartment. Under Stalinism then, “people were not passive recipients of propaganda, but actively used ideological discourse to create a conception of the self”(Merrill, 309) and of the environment that this self inhabits.

By the final chapters of The Master and Margarita, the collapse of Soviet spatial order reaches a point of irreversibility. The characters who had started to traverse Moscow’s newly disordered spaces are either removed from the city (either through death or flight) or left behind to confront the altered urban landscape. Yet the meaning that had now become embedded in Moscow: collective memory, emotional attachments, and the imagination, continue to resonate. The persistence of sentiment, even after spatial and ideological disintegration, underscores Bulgakov’s overall view of the Soviet city as a sentimental city first. An example appears in the novel’s closing scene, as we again return to Ivan’s fate. While recovered and living a seemingly normal life as a professor, he experiences recurring dreams of his supernatural encounters. Despite the state’s conclusion that the events were mass hypnosis, Ivan’s memories endure. His dreams are not random hallucinations, but structured revisitings of the spaces and emotional experiences he once navigated: Patriarch’s Ponds, the courtyard, the apartment at 302-bis Sadovaya. The moonlight, additionally, becomes a spatial motif of sentiment and memory, transcending the Soviet city’s material and ideological landscape: “it is always one and the same thing that awakens the scholar…a broad path of moonlight stretches from his bed to the window”(Bulgakov, 402). Even when the rational city denies memory, there are always reminders that one cannot escape from and which the city cannot resist. Moscow’s past meaning, even ones that have since been erased or repurposed, continue to shape Ivan’s experience of his psychological and urban landscape. This further aligns with Merrifield’s claim that sentimental cities retain a power of the past as a “phantasmal zone that’s almost gone but needs defending”(Merrifield, 939), spaces whose emotional significance outlive its material form.

There is a similar treatment by Bulgakov of Patriarch’s Ponds. In the novel’s opening, it represents a rational Soviet order, a park intended for leisure with everything around it being controlled, such as the trams. But by the end, though the physical space remains unchanged, it becomes the central symbol of the supernatural rupture. The park’s meaning has been permanently altered by the collective experiences of the citizens, even notwithstanding the state’s attempts to overwrite it. Bulgakov tries to show how though the state’s narrative may reclaim the surface meaning of spaces, as it is able to control it, the experiential and emotional mappings created by its inhabitants persist in the imaginations of individuals like Ivan, but also now in the reader. The sentimental city is created in the meanings carried by those who remember and reimagine the urban landscape.

In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov presents a vision of Moscow that defies the Soviet state’s desire for spatial and ideological uniformity and control. Instead of being a static embodiment of collectivist ideals, the city is described to be a shifting, emotionally charged landscape whose meaning is constantly being redefined and the novel’s characters navigate this instability in a variety of ways. Margarita and the Master embrace an imaginative defiance which leads to them completely reshaping their experience of the city, both spatially and temporally (time seems to slow down in flight and in the parallel dimension of the ball). Others, like Ivan, struggle to reconcile the state’s rational narrative with their lingering emotional experiences and for them, spatial redefinition becomes more psychological. Yet regardless of the ways in which it is achieved, by the novel’s conclusion, Moscow no longer functions as a coherent ideological apparatus for anyone. Urban space resists any fixed or imposed meaning and is rather a palimpsest of sentiment, memory and imaginative drift, a true sentimental city. Soviet material structures refract official ideology revealing how even the most controlled environments are sites of constant negotiation. Official narratives completely fail to script the urban experience. But space doesn’t just carry private meaning throughout the novel, it rather becomes an active, insatiable field where individual actions impose onto the collective experience and expose the fragility of the existing spatial logic. Therefore we see how the novel’s characters aren’t passive inhabitants but rather their navigation of Moscow is based on constant spatial contestation. At large, Bulgakov’s Moscow breaks the fourth wall by also becoming an active participant in the urban experiences of its readers. Now, anyone visiting Moscow has a certain memory associated with its streets, courtyard and buildings through the novel, ultimately revealing how memory and sentiment triumphs over official narratives to define urban reality.

Bibliography

• Bulgakov, Mikhail. “The Master and Margarita.” Translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, Penguin Classics, 2007.
• Merrill, Jessica E. “The Stalinist Subject and Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita.’” The Russian Review, vol. 74, no. 2, 2015, pp. 293–310. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43662240.
• Humphrey, Caroline. “Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 11, no. 1, 2005, pp. 39–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3803988. Accessed 8 May 2025.
• Merrifield, Andrew. “The sentimental city: the lost urbanism of Pierre Mac Orlan and Guy Debord.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28, 2004, 930-940. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-