Barvikha Clinical Sanatorium

Station «Barvikha», Odintsovskiy district, Moscow Region
In November-December 1939, Mikhail Bulgakov was treated in the Barkhiva government sanatorium.
In August 1939, after the play Batum was banned, Bulgakov’s health took a serious turn for the worse (‘I was talking with a lady when suddenly she was clouded out’, Bulgakov told his sister Nadezhda). At the beginning of September, the Bulgakovs travelled to relax in Leningrad, however they soon returned – Mikhail Afanasevich’s condition got worse (‘I went onto Nevsky Prospekt and suddenly realised that I couldn’t see any signs…’. In Moscow he was given a grim diagnosis – acute hypertensive nephrosclerosis. A genetic predisposition had reared its head – in 1907, Bulgakov’s father Afanasy Ivanovich died of the very same condition before the family’s eyes. Bulgakov wrote from the Barvikha Sanatorium to his sister Elena in a letter of 3rd December 1939 that his condition had improved: ‘There may be hope that I’ll escape the old lady’s scythe this time’; he described the sanatorium and his treatment: ‘This is a well-equipped clinical sanatorium, which is comfortable… I’m being treated attentively and preferentially with a specially selected combined diet… all kinds of fruit and vegetables… they say there’s no other way, that otherwise they can’t heal me properly. Well, reading and writing is so important to me that I’m prepared to chew on rubbish like carrots’. Contrary to the expectations of those close to him, Bulgakov understood that there was a tragic outcome lying before him, which he wrote about at the end of December in a letter to his childhood friend A. Gdeshinsky, ‘The thought that I returned to die is hard to bear. I don’t like it for one reason: it’s torturous, vexatious and trite’. Despite the temporary improvements, the illness progressed rapidly and from 25th January 1940, the writer’s health began to deteriorate sharply. On 10th March 1940 at 16:39, Mikhail Bulgakov passed away.