For our neighborhood, we (Julia Preston and Maya Costales) chose Patriarch Ponds. We visited the area a total of four times together over the course of the term. We chose Patriarch Ponds because we’d read about it in The Master and Margarita and we were curious what the area was like today in comparison to the 1940’s. Patriarch Ponds is a relatively small area, the name referencing a large man-made basin in the center of a park, surrounded by apartment buildings. The surrounding area contains more apartments, but also commercial buildings. There are restaurants and shops on the ground floor facing the square as well. The shops you’ll find in Patriarch Ponds are more upscale than you’ll find in most of Moscow, and almost seem designed to cater to wealthy Western tourists. During our first outing we quickly noticed how the neighborhood was peppered with luxury cars, designer fashion stores, and high end cafes. Walking around Patriarch Ponds, it felt as if we were twice outsiders because we were so recognizably foreign and not extremely wealthy.
The nearest metro stop to Patriarch Ponds is Mayakovskaya, about three blocks away, which opens onto another square, centered around a statue of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Also flanking the square is the Tchaikovsky Theater and the Hotel Peking, both rather magnificent buildings. This further augments the sense of the Patriarch Ponds area as a artistically influenced, cultural place. The Bulgakov apartment museum is also on the way between the metro station and the pond, and the area around the pond contains several Master and Margarita-themed establishments such as Cafe Behemoth, named after the novel’s demonic black cat. Ironically, Bulgakov and Mayakovsky, who were contemporaries, loathed each other personally and in this neighborhood they are inseparable. A third, more neutral literary reference in the neighborhood is the statue of the Russian folklorist Krilov that is on the pond square, as well as several smaller statues showing scenes of cavorting animals from Russian fables. Each of these storybook shaped sculptures depicts a scene from one of his tales in relief, and in several places the dull brown of the metal has been polished to a mirror shine by the hands of visitors.
When I (Julia) visited the area to view the Victory Day parade with my Russian friend Katya, she told me about the rivalry between Mayakovsky and Bulgakov, as well as a lot of stories about the impact of Master and Margarita on the neighborhood. When the book was first circulating in samizdat (underground channels for banned books and other writings during the Soviet period), the Patriarch Ponds neighborhood was visited by floods of secretive tourists, cautiously investigating locales described in the book, while trying not to acknowledge that they’d read it too openly. Over the decades, as Master and Margarita has taken its place as a modern Russian classic, the modern-day design of the neighborhood has clearly embraced its literary history and Bulgakov-inspired tourists. The park around the pond even sports a sign telling visitors not to talk to strangers, cheekily referencing the arrival of Bulgakov’s ominous Woland in the area and the chaos that follows.
This sign also, unfortunately, describes the attitude of many of Patriarch Ponds’ residents and native Moscow resident passers-by, who rebuffed our advances as we attempted to interview them for this project. While not everyone was in a hurry, groups of people sunning themselves by the pond also didn’t want to chat. While Patriarch Ponds gets a lot of visitors from other neighborhoods since it’s such a beautiful area, the residents themselves are quite a posh lot, since apartments in the area are quite expensive. Contrary to our first impression, the ultra high-end stores are not meant to cater to tourists specifically, however the area also is home to many ex-pats.
These demographics are visible in the types of commercial establishments that cluster around the pond. We twice visited a cake shop on the square, which serves enormous slices of ornate layered cakes embellished with fresh fruits, nuts, and whipped cream. The cakes are quite western in style, indistinguishable from what you might find in a boutique-y dessert store in some gentrifying neighborhood of an American city. Another restaurant, serving Russian food, is Mari Vanna which also has an outpost in St. Petersburg and at least one in the United States. There are also expensive western fashion brands with outlets around Patriarch Ponds, and high-end grocery stores, although we also found a reasonably-priced pharmaceutical chain and several empty storefronts, our student guide told us that the presence of these stores in such an expensive neighborhood was probably an effect of the economic recession. In general, though, Patriarch Ponds has an internationalized and high-end flair.
