On 12th March 1940, Mikhail Bulgakov was cremated here.

‘And now then he will be driven around the city! It means that now he will be driven to the crematorium to be burned. And from the crematorium take him over to Novdevichy Convent again’, says Azazello to Margarita in one of the editions of The Master and Margarita. The phenomenon of cremation was one of the symbols of the new Soviet Russia. As part of the antireligious campaign, the church was deprived of the right to register deaths, and cremation was contrary to the old funerary tradition. At the end of 1927, propaganda promoting the ‘temple of modernity’ began with the opening of the First Moscow (Donskoy) Crematorium. At various different times, many famous writers were cremated here (M. Gorky, V. Mayakovsky, A. Bely and others). The dying Bulgakov asked for a secular funeral, and his body was cremated. Sergey Ermolinsky told M. Chudakova that Bulgakov, ‘Was afraid of what happened to Gogol! After the reburial, many people were talking about it in Moscow. And on more than once occasion, he said, “Do you remember how Gogol turned in his grave?.. No, no – to the crematorium! Even if you wake up there, you won’t have time to feel anything – puff, and you’re gone! Ermolinsky wrote about the day of the cremation in his memoirs, ‘On the way to the crematorium, we dropped by the Art Theatre. The whole troupe and staff were waiting for him by the entrance. Then we went along to the Bolshoy Theatre where many people stood by the columns also waiting for him. I don’t think he’d have been surprised. I think he knew: whatever happened to him in these theatres, they sincerely loved him there’. The writer’s ashes were buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.