Novodevichy Convent

1 Novodevichy passage
Subway station «Sportivnaya»
“Woland, Koroviev and Behemoth sat mounted on black horses, looking at the city spread out beyond the river with fragments of sun glittering from thousands of west-facing windows, and at the onion-domes of the Novodevichy [Convent]”. This is how Moscow would be seen by Bulgakov’s devilish entourage in his final novel, before they left the city for good.
The Novodevichy Convent and its surroundings were one of Bulgakov’s favourite places in Moscow alongside Pashkov’s house and Patriarch Ponds. From 1928 to 1934, Bulgakov lived near the Convent in a house on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, about which Liubov Belozerskaya remembered: ‘If you go out of our house and look around to your left, you’ll see a well-proportioned six-tiered bell tower and the outline of a monastery. It’s an unusually beautiful area. Perhaps it’s one of the best in Moscow.’ Elena Bulgakova, the writer’s third wife, remembered how she skied or simply walked around the ‘old areas’ at Novodevichy with Bulgakov. ‘What does it matter to a dead man?.. The only flat he needs now, Nikanor Ivanovich, is Novodevichy Convent…’ Regardless of the fact that the monastery only figures at the end of the final version of Sunset Novel, in earlier versions, the author referred to it more often. In The Great Chancellor, Woland and his retinue walked to Vorobyovy Hills through the surroundings of the Novodevichy Convent – ‘neither the chaos of the innumerable buildings around the monastery, nor the rows of white giants whose windows glared with broken reflections of the sun which hurt the eyes, nor the bustle of people on the circular tramline by the monstery walls [attracted his attention]… The city no longer interested its guest.’ Judging by the rough drafts of the novel, Mikhail Berlioz’s remains should have been brought to the Novodevichy Convent – the author himself shared the final route of this character in 1940.