A sideboard, or a buffet, that stands in the living room is a symbol of home comfort. It helps turn the room into a dining room. Family kitchenware, sweets, letters and postcards, and photos of loved ones are usually kept in a buffet.

The sideboard made of durable oak from the museum’s collection is not a memorial item. It is a reference to the novel “The White Guard”. The images of its protagonists — the Turbins — were inspired by Bulgakov’s relatives and friends. In the late 1930s, Mikhail Bulgakov told his sister Nadezhda,

There are many other objects in the room that allude to the novel. These include the cream curtains, a lampshade, a wall clock, and a piano. And yet the sideboard plays a special role there. It becomes the center of the dining room, and the dining room itself is a place for family feasts and gatherings.

“For many years before her death, in the house at No. 13 St Alexei’s Hill, little Elena, Alexei the eldest and baby Nikolka had grown up in the warmth of the tiled stove that burned in the dining-room.”In the novel “The White Guard” Bulgakov describes how the Turbins gather in a cozy dining room: they exchange news, have lunch and meet friends.

Bulgakov wrote his novel “The White Guard” in a cramped room of a noisy and cold communal apartment at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. The Turbins’ dining room was the focus and embodiment of a bygone pre-revolutionary comfort that he could only revive on the pages of his novel. When Bulgakov was working on it, his family had already broken up: he lived in Moscow, his brothers went abroad, and his mother died of typhus. Bulgakov’s family was no longer destined to gather as they did before in the dining room with a snow-white tablecloth.