Hell in a Communal Apartment: Analysis of the Housing Practices Described in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

The author analyzes and interprets the housing practices of Muscovites in Soviet Russia of the 1930s through Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. Literature is here used as a source of knowledge about the social world, and the author also makes numerous references to works on the subject of Bulgakov’s masterpiece. She shows how the fantastical picture presented in the novel, which in large measure corresponded to Bulgakov’s personal experience, brought to the fore those paradoxes of Soviet conditions that testified to the degeneration of the system