Reading Master and Margarita - 09

Chapter – 9

Koroviev's Stunts

So, Woland’s activities have started in Moscow. First he occupies flat No. 50 of building No. 302, in which Berlioz used to live along with Stepan Likhodeev.

Woland and his team stay in this flat for three days and we shall see what all they do; how they make Moscow feel about their presence.

We shall see what happens the very next day after Berlioz’s tragic death:

·         Stepan Likhodeev is thrown into Yalta;

·         A transformation has started taking place in Ivan’s thinking.

All this happens at around twelve in the morning.     

What happens in building No. 302?

The president of housing society of building No. 302, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi, was busy during the intermittent night of Wednesday and Thursday. At around midnight a committee comes to the building No. 302. Jheldibin, who was going to be the president of MASSOLIT in place of late Berlioz was also there in the committee. They informed Nikanor Ivanovich about Berlioz’s death. His papers and other things are sealed, the two rooms which he was using, were also sealed.

And the news about Berlioz’s death spreads like wild fire. Everyone is trying to take advantage of this opportunity. President’s office is flooded with applications for these two rooms.

From here we come to know that the action of the novel has started on Wednesday – Berlioz is killed, Ivan is sent to Stravinsky’s clinic. On Thursday Stepan Likhodeev is flung out of flat No. 50 and thrown into Yalta.

Coming back to Nikanor Ivanovich. 

From the applications that Nikanor Ivanovich received, readers come to know in what circumstances people lived in community buildings, and what all they were doing to procure some reasonable sort of accommodation.

They were requesting the president of the housing society to give them Berlioz’s two rooms; they were threatening him; they were putting conditions; they were trying to bribe him; they were telling to carry out repairs with their own money.

They found that their co-dwellers were thieves and robbers; they were illiterate, uncultured people:

In the period of two hours, Nikanor Ivanovich received thirty-two such declarations.

They contained pleas, threats, libels, denunciations, promises to do renovations at their own expense, references to unbearable overcrowding and the impossibility of living in the same apartment with bandits. Among others there were a description, staggering in its artistic power, of the theft from apartment no. 51 of some meat dumplings, tucked directly into the pocket of a suit jacket, two vows to end life by suicide and one confession of secret pregnancy.

Nikanor Ivanovich was called out to the front hall of his apartment, plucked by the sleeve, whispered to, winked at, promised that he would not be left the loser.

This torture went on until noon, when Nikanor Ivanovich simply fled his apartment for the management office by the gate, but when he saw them lying in wait for him there, too, he fled that place as well. Having somehow shaken off those who followed on his heels across the asphalt-paved courtyard, Nikanor Ivanovich disappeared into the sixth entrance and went up to the fifth floor, where this vile apartment no.50 was located.

…

After catching his breath on the landing, the corpulent Nikanor Ivanovich rang, but no one opened for him. He rang again, and then again, and started grumbling and swearing quietly. Even then no one opened. His patience exhausted, Nikanor Ivanovich took from his pocket a bunch of duplicate keys belonging to the house management, opened the door with a sovereign hand, and went in.

'Hey, housekeeper!' Nikanor Ivanovich cried in the semi-dark front hall. 'Grunya, or whatever your name is! ... Are you here?'

No one responded.

Then Nikanor Ivanovich took a folding ruler from his briefcase, removed the seal from the door to the study, and stepped in. Stepped in, yes, but halted in amazement in the doorway and even gave a start.

At the deceased's desk sat an unknown, skinny, long citizen in a little checkered jacket, a jockey's cap, and a pince-nez... well, in short, that same one.

'And who might you be, citizen?' Nikanor Ivanovich asked fearfully.

'Hah! Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unexpected citizen yelled in a rattling tenor and, jumping up, greeted the chairman with a forced and sudden handshake. This greeting by no means gladdened Nikanor Ivanovich.

'Excuse me,' he said suspiciously, 'but who might you be? Are you an official person?'

'Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. "What are official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the subject. It's all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I'm an unofficial person, and tomorrow, lo and behold, I'm an official one! And it also happens the other way round - oh, how it does!'

This argument in no way satisfied the chairman of the house management. Being a generally suspicious person by nature, he concluded that the man holding forth in front of him was precisely an unofficial person, and perhaps even an idle one.

"Yes, but who might you be? What's your name?' the chairman inquired with increasing severity and even began to advance upon the unknown man.

`My name,' the citizen responded, not a bit put out by the severity, 'well, let's say it's Koroviev. But wouldn't you like a little snack, Nikanor Ivanovich? No formalities, eh?'

`Excuse me,' Nikanor Ivanovich began, indignantly now, `what have snacks got to do with it!'

(We must confess, unpleasant as it is, that Nikanor Ivanovich was of a somewhat rude nature.)

'Sitting in the deceased's half is not permitted! What are you doing here?'

`Have a seat, Nikanor Ivanovich,' the citizen went on yelling, not a bit at a loss, and began fussing about offering the chairman a seat.

Utterly infuriated, Nikanor Ivanovich rejected the seat and screamed:

'But who are you?'

'I, if you please, serve as interpreter for a foreign individual who has taken up residence in this apartment,' the man calling himself Koroviev introduced himself and clicked the heels of his scuffed, unpolished shoes.

Nikanor Ivanovich opened his mouth. The presence of some foreigner in this apartment, with an interpreter to boot, came as a complete surprise to him, and he demanded explanations.

The interpreter explained willingly. A foreign artiste, Mr Woland, had been kindly invited by the director of the Variety, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev, to spend the time of his performances, a week or so, in his apartment, about which he had written to Nikanor Ivanovich yesterday, requesting that he register the foreigner as a temporary resident, while Likhodeev himself took a trip to Yalta.

'He never wrote me anything,' the chairman said in amazement.

`Just look through your briefcase, Nikanor Ivanovich,' Koroviev suggested sweetly.

Nikanor Ivanovich, shrugging his shoulders, opened the briefcase and found Likhodeev's letter in it.

`How could I have forgotten about it?' Nikanor Ivanovich muttered, looking dully at the opened envelope.

Nikanor Ivanovich informs the tourist bureau about this strange foreigner and he is told that they already have information about him and have no objection to his staying in Likhodeev’s  flat for one week.

Nikanor Ivanovich is paid rent towards the flat:

…And for your association, Nikanor Ivanovich, it's a sheer gain and an obvious profit. He won't stint on money.' Koroviev looked around and then whispered into the chairman's ear: 'A millionaire!'

The interpreter's offer made clear practical sense, it was a very solid offer, yet there was something remarkably unsolid in his manner of speaking, and in his clothes, and in that loathsome, good-for-nothing pince-nez. As a result, something vague weighed on the chairman's soul, but he nevertheless decided to accept the offer. The thing was that the tenants' association, alas, had quite a sizeable deficit. Fuel had to be bought for the heating system by fall, but who was going to shell out for it - no one knew. But with the foreign tourist's money, it might be possible to wriggle out of it.

However, the practical and prudent Nikanor Ivanovich said he would first have to settle the question with the foreign tourist bureau.

`I understand!' Koroviev cried out. `You've got to settle it! Absolutely! Here's the telephone, Nikanor Ivanovich, settle it at once! And don't be shy about the money,' he added in a whisper, drawing the chairman to the telephone in the front hall, 'if he won't pay, who will! You should see the villa he's got in Nice! Next summer, when you go abroad, come especially to see it - you'll gasp!'

The business with the foreign tourist bureau was arranged over the phone with an extraordinary speed, quite amazing to the chairman. It turned out that they already knew about Mr Woland's intention of staying in Likhodeev's private apartment and had no objections to it.

`That's wonderful!' Koroviev yelled. Somewhat stunned by his chatter, the chairman announced that the tenants' association agreed to rent apartment no.50 for a week to the artiste Woland, for... Nikanor Ivanovich faltered a little, then said:

'For five hundred roubles a day.'

Here Koroviev utterly amazed the chairman. Winking thievishly in the direction of the bedroom, from which the soft leaps of a heavy cat could be heard, he rasped out:

'So it comes to three thousand five hundred for the week?'

To which Nikanor Ivanovich thought he was going to add: 'Some appetite you've got, Nikanor Ivanovich!' but Koroviev said something quite different:

'What kind of money is that? Ask five, he'll pay it.'

Grinning perplexedly, Nikanor Ivanovich, without noticing how, found himself at the deceased's writing desk, where Koroviev with great speed and dexterity drew up a contract in two copies.

Then he flew to the bedroom with them and came back, both copies now bearing the foreigner's sweeping signature. The chairman also signed the contract. Here Koroviev asked for a receipt for five...

Write it out, write it out, Nikanor Ivanovich!... thousand roubles...' And with words somehow unsuited to serious business - 'Bin, zwei, drei!' - he laid out for the chairman five stacks of new banknotes.

The counting-up took place, interspersed with Koroviev's quips and quiddities, such as 'Cash loves counting', 'Your own eye won't lie', and others of the same sort.

Another bundle of rubles is also offered to him for his ‘services’, which he accepts after confirming that there is no ‘witness’ to this transaction:

After counting the money, the chairman received from Koroviev the foreigner's passport for temporary registration, put it, together with the contract and the money, into his briefcase, and, somehow unable to help himself, sheepishly asked for a free pass...

'Don't mention it!' bellowed Koroviev. 'How many tickets do you want, Nikanor Ivanovich -twelve, fifteen?'

The flabbergasted chairman explained that all he needed was a couple of passes, for himself and Pelageya Antonovna, his wife.

Koroviev snatched out a notebook at once and dashed off a pass for Nikanor Ivanovich, for two persons in the front row. And with his left hand the interpreter deftly slipped this pass to Nikanor Ivanovich, while with his right he put into the chairman's other hand a thick, crackling wad.

Casting an eye on it, Nikanor Ivanovich blushed deeply and began to push it away.

'It isn't done...' he murmured.

'I won't hear of it,' Koroviev whispered right in his ear. 'With us it's not done, but with foreigners it is. You'll offend him, Nikanor Ivanovich, and that's embarrassing. You've worked hard...'

`It's severely punishable,' the chairman whispered very, very softly and glanced over his shoulder.

'But where are the witnesses?' Koroviev whispered into his other ear.

'I ask you, where are they? You don't think... ?'

Here, as the chairman insisted afterwards, a miracle occurred: the wad crept into his briefcase by itself. And then the chairman, somehow limp and even broken, found himself on the stairs. A whirlwind of thoughts raged in his head. There was the villa in Nice, and the trained cat, and the thought that there were in fact no witnesses, and that Pelageya Antonovna would be delighted with the pass. They were incoherent thoughts, but generally pleasant. But, all the same, somewhere, some little needle kept pricking the chairman in the very bottom of his soul. This was the needle of anxiety.

After coming home Nikanor Ivanovich wraps the notes in a newspaper and hides them in the ventilator of his lavatory.

But, then, the roubles get converted into foreign currency; someone informs the authorities that Nikanor Ivanovich takes bribe in foreign denominations. The Secret Service men come to his flat and find the bundle of notes in the ventilator of lavatory of Nikanor Ivanovich’s flat. This is how it had happened:

As soon as the chairman left the apartment, a low voice came from the bedroom:

'I didn't like this Nikanor Ivanovich. He is a chiseller and a crook. Can it be arranged so that he doesn't come any more?'

'Messire, you have only to say the word...' Koroviev responded from somewhere, not in a rattling but in a very clear and resounding voice.

And at once the accursed interpreter turned up in the front hall, dialled a number there, and for some reason began speaking very tearfully into the receiver:

'Hello! I consider it my duty to inform you that the chairman of our tenants' association at no.502-bis on Sadovaya, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, is speculating in foreign currency. At the present moment, in his apartment no. 55, he has four hundred dollars wrapped up in newspaper in the ventilation of the privy. This is Timofei Kvastsov speaking, a tenant of the said house, apartment no. 11. But I adjure you to keep my name a secret. I fear the vengeance of the above-stated chairman.'

And he hung up, the scoundrel!

Actually,  Koroviev had informed the authorities using the name of Secretary of housing society, Timofei Kvastsov…NIkanor Ivanovich is arrested…he tries to explain that he had taken roubles towards rent for the flat in which the mysterious professor was going to stay for one week; he tries to show Styopa Likhodeev’s letter, the contract signed between him and Woland, his passport…but everything had vanished…the contract, the passport, the money, the tickets for the evening show had vanished in the thin air.

From now on wards the things are getting complicated. Many unbelievable and magical, many serious things happen…those who are guilty in some way or other are punished…like Styopa was punished for his incompetence and misuse of official position, Nikanor Ivanovich is punished for taking bribe; interestingly, every victim of Woland’s gang exclaims in vain that the Devil has entered Moscow…

The chain of events that started with Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomnyi has now taken Styopa and Nikanor Ivanovich into its folds.

Next chapter tells exclusively about the Variety Theatre’s administrative officers, intrigues between them…

Reading Master and Margarita - 08

Chapter 8

The Combat between the Professor and the Poet

This chapter depicts the conversation which takes place between Professor Stravinsky and Ivan Bezdomnyi in Professor’s clinic.

Action takes place on the second day, approximately at that time when Stepan Likhodeev was flung out of his flat. Ivan wakes up in Room No 117 of Professor Stravinsky’s clinic.

He names the room where he is going to be interrogated by the doctors as ‘Factory-Kitchen’.

We notice that Ivan has calmed down a little. He is convinced that he can’t get out of here and hence he decides to cooperate with the doctors.

When the nurse, attending on him praises her hospital, note how Ivan reacts:

…on seeing the water gush into the tub in a wide stream from the gleaming faucet, said ironically:

'Look there! Just like the Metropol!...'

'Oh, no,' the woman answered proudly, `much better. There is no such equipment even anywhere abroad. Scientists and doctors come especially to study our clinic. We have foreign tourists every day.'

At the words 'foreign tourists', Ivan at once remembered yesterday's consultant. Ivan darkened, looked sullen, and said: `Foreign tourists... How you all adore foreign tourists! But among them, incidentally, you come across all sorts. I, for instance, met one yesterday - quite something!'

There was a general feeling of anger towards the foreigners…people did not like to interact with them; they were angry that foreigners were given many facilities and preferences over the Russians in the Soviet Union.

Another remark about educated people:

When Professor Stravinsky tries to find out in a reasonable way why Ivan wanted to get the mysterious Professor arrested, Ivan is impressed by his approach to the whole thing and he thinks, “This man is intelligent. I must confess that sometimes you find intelligent people among the intellectuals.  You can’t deny this.”

He cooperates with Professor Stravinsky who succeeds in convincing him that Ivan need not personally rush to the police station to complain about the whole episode. It would be better to give a description of the whole episode and proper action will be taken by the authorities.

So, from an aggressive and adamant Ivan we see a person who is in the reconciliatory mode. This is the middle stage of Ivan’s complete transformation. Soon we shall see a calm and intelligent Ivan in the following chapters who comes to understand the reality of the world in general and that of the literary world in particular!

Reading Master and Margarita - 07

Chapter 7

A Naughty Apartment

Earlier we have seen what sorts of facilities were provided to the litterateurs in the Soviet Union. Bulgakov knew this world very well. He knew that only the proletarian writers enjoyed the best treatment provided by the government. But they had to follow the diktats of powers. Those who did not do so suffered a lot. Bulgakov was one of them.

Chapter 7 is the beginning of narration about the theatre: the actors, the administrators, playwrights etc. etc.

Chapter 7 tells about the director of Variety Theatre Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev.

Styopa (Stepan ) lived in Flat No. 50, building No 302, Sadovaya Street. He shared the flat with Berlioz.

This flat was infamous. It belonged to the widow of jeweler D’Fougeray, Anna Frantsevna D’ Fougeray. After Revolution she let out three rooms, out of five, to two people. They disappeared without leaving any trace; Anna Frantsevna disappeared, her maid Anfisa too disappeared. And those who disappeared never came back.

It must be said that this apartment - no.50 - had long had, if not a bad, at least a strange reputation. Two years ago it had still belonged to the widow of the jeweller de Fougeray. Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray, a respectable and very practical fifty-year-old woman, let out three of the five rooms to lodgers: one whose last name was apparently Belomut, and another with a lost last name.

And then two years ago inexplicable events began to occur in this apartment: people began to disappear from this apartment without a trace.

Once, on a day off, a policeman came to the apartment, called the second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) out to the front hall, and said he was invited to come to the police station for a minute to put his signature to something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna's long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but never came back at all. The most surprising thing was that the policeman evidently vanished along with him.

The pious, or, to speak more frankly, superstitious Anfisa declared outright to the very upset Anna Frantsevna that it was sorcery and that she knew perfectly well who had stolen both the lodger and the policeman, only she did not wish to talk about it towards night-time.

Well, but with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there's no stopping it. The second lodger is remembered to have disappeared on a Monday, and that Wednesday Belomut seemed to drop from sight, though, true, under different circumstances. In the morning a car came, as usual, to take him to work, and it did take him to work, but it did not bring anyone back or come again itself.

Madame Belomut's grief and horror defied description. But, alas, neither the one nor the other continued for long. That same night, on returning with Anfisa from her dacha, which Anna Frantsevna had hurried off to for some reason, she did not find the wife of citizen Belomut in the apartment. And not only that: the doors of the two rooms occupied by the Belomut couple turned out to be sealed.

Two days passed somehow. On the third day, Anna Frantsevna, who had suffered all the while from insomnia, again left hurriedly for her dacha... Needless to say, she never came back!

Left alone, Anfisa, having wept her fill, went to sleep past one o'clock in the morning. What happened to her after that is not known, but lodgers in other apartments told of hearing some sort of knocking all night in no.50 and of seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning.

In the morning it turned out that there was also no Anfisa!

For a long time all sorts of legends were repeated in the house about these disappearances and about the accursed apartment, such as, for instance, 'that this dry and pious little Anfisa had supposedly carried on her dried-up breast, in a suede bag, twenty-five big diamonds belonging to Anna Frantsevna. That in the woodshed of that very dacha to which Anna Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up, of themselves, some inestimable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, plus some gold coins of tsarist minting... And so on, in the same vein. Well, what we don't know, we can't vouch for.

However it may have been, the apartment stood empty and sealed for only a week. Then the late Berlioz moved in with his wife, and this same Styopa, also with his wife. It was perfectly natural that, as soon as they got into the malignant apartment, devil knows what started happening with them as well! Namely, within the space of a month both wives vanished. But these two not without a trace. Of Berlioz's wife it was told that she had supposedly been seen in Kharkov with some ballet-master, while Styopa's wife allegedly turned up on Bozhedomka Street, where wagging tongues said the director of the Variety, using his innumerable acquaintances, had contrived to get her a room, but on the one condition that she never show her face on Sadovaya...

This points to the real situation of that period when people would disappear, especially at nights. Their fate could never be known.

So, in the morning after Berlioz’s death, Styopa wakes up in his bed room with great difficulty. He sees a foreigner in front of him, who tells him that he is the professor of black magic and that the previous day Styopa had signed an agreement with him for giving a show of black magic in the Variety. Even some advance amount was paid to this magician.

Styopa thinks that as he had consumed a lot of Vodka, he is unable to remember anything about the magician and about his show. The magician shows him the contract…Styopa contacts the financial director of Variety who also confirms that the show of magician is scheduled for that very evening…

When Styopa comes back to the bed room after calling the financial director on telephone, he sees that the magician is now accompanied by three associates whom he sees entering the room one by one from the mirror –

The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom, but had company: in the second armchair sat the same type he had imagined in the front hall. Now he was clearly visible: the feathery moustache, one lens of the pince-nez gleaming, the other not there. But worse things were to be found in the bedroom: on the jeweller's wife's ottoman, in a casual pose, sprawled a third party - namely, a black cat of uncanny size, with a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in the other.

The light, faint in the bedroom anyway, now began to grow quite dark in Styopa's eyes. This is apparently how one loses one's mind...' he thought and caught hold of the doorpost.

`I see you're somewhat surprised, my dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?'

Woland inquired of the teeth-chattering Styopa. `And yet there's nothing to be surprised at. This is my retinue.'

Here the cat tossed off the vodka, and Styopa's hand began to slide down the doorpost.

'And this retinue requires room,' Woland continued, 'so there's just one too many of us in the apartment. And it seems to us that this one too many is precisely you.'

Theirself, theirself!' the long checkered one sang in a goat's voice, referring to Styopa in the plural. 'Generally, theirself has been up to some terrible swinishness lately. Drinking, using their position to have liaisons with women, don't do devil a thing, and can't do anything, because they don't know anything of what they're supposed to do. Pulling the wool over their superiors' eyes.' `Availing hisself of a government car!' the cat snitched, chewing a mushroom.

And here occurred the fourth and last appearance in the apartment, as Styopa, having slid all the way to the floor, clawed at the doorpost with an enfeebled hand.

Straight from the pier-glass stepped a short but extraordinarily broad-shouldered man, with a bowler hat on his head and a fang sticking out of his mouth, which made still uglier a physiognomy unprecedentedly loathsome without that. And with flaming red hair besides.

'Generally,' this new one entered into the conversation, `I don't understand how he got to be a director,' the redhead's nasal twang was growing stronger and stronger, 'he's as much a director as I'm a bishop.'

"You don't look like a bishop, Azazello,' the cat observed, heaping his plate with

frankfurters.

That's what I mean,' twanged the redhead and, turning to Woland, he added deferentially:

'Allow me, Messire, to chuck him the devil out of Moscow?'

'Scat!' the cat barked suddenly, bristling his fur.

And then the bedroom started spinning around Styopa, he hit his head against the doorpost, and, losing consciousness, thought: 'I'm dying...'

We notice that the magician explains that this is his team and the team needs space to live. The only person who is extremely useless here is Styopa and he has to leave the flat.

We also notice that Styopa’s uselessness  is proved by the cat : He is a rogue, gets involved in scandals, misuses the official car, misuses his official position to get things done in his favour, does not do his work properly – because he does not know anything!

It is not only Styopa whose qualities are described, but Bulgakov is indicating that worthless people are occupying important positions in the theatrical world.

Styopa is hurled out of the flat and he finds himself on the sea shore at Yalta!

Reading Master and Margarita - 06

Chapter 6

Schizophrenia, as was said

It was half past one in the morning when a man with a pointed beard and wearing a white coat came out to the examining room of the famous psychiatric clinic, built recently on the outskirts of Moscow by the bank of the river. Three orderlies had their eyes fastened on Ivan Nikolaevich, who was sitting on a couch. The extremely agitated poet Riukhin was also there.

The napkins with which Ivan Nikolaevich had been bed up lay in a pile on the same couch. Ivan Nikolaevich's arms and legs were free.

This clinic of Prof Stravinsky is newly opened in the outskirts of city and we shall see that more and more people will land there.

Ivan Bezdomnyi threatens that he will protest against his being forcibly brought to this mental hospital, he emphasizes that he is completely normal.

'You can all go to the devil!' Ivan shouted rudely and turned away.

'But why are you angry? Did I say anything unpleasant to you?'

'I'm twenty-three years old,' Ivan began excitedly, 'and I'll file a complaint against you all. And particularly against you, louse!' he adverted separately to Riukhin.

'And what do you want to complain about?'

'About the fact that I, a healthy man, was seized and dragged by force to a madhouse!' Ivan replied wrathfully.

Here Riukhin looked closely at Ivan and went cold: there was decidedly no insanity in the man's eyes. No longer dull as they had been at Griboedov's, they were now clear as ever.

Now Riukhin realizes that Ivan has no trace of any mental disorder on his face. He is scared….

And Ivan shouts at him that he will ‘see’ Riukhin, even calls him ‘lice’!

Ivan goes on exposing poet Riukhin.

'Thank the Lord! One normal man has finally turned up among the idiots, of whom the first is that giftless goof Sashka!'

'Who is this giftless Sashka?' the doctor inquired.

'This one here - Riukhin,' Ivan replied, jabbing his dirty finger in Riukhin's direction.

The latter flushed with indignation.

… …

'Psychologically, a typical little kulak,' Ivan Nikolaevich began, evidently from an irresistible urge to denounce Riukhin, 'and, what's more, a little kulak carefully disguising himself as a proletarian. Look at his lenten physiognomy, and compare it with those resounding verses he wrote for the First of May - heh, heh, heh ... "Soaring up!" and "Soaring down!!" But if you could look inside him and see what he thinks... you'd gasp!' And Ivan Nikolaevich burst into sinister laughter.

Riukhin was breathing heavily, turned red, and thought of just one thing, that he had warmed a serpent on his breast, that he had shown concern for a man who turned out to be a vicious enemy. And, above all, there was nothing to be done: there's no arguing with the mentally ill!

Riukhin does not argue. But while returning to Moscow he confesses that whatever insulting words were hurled at him by Ivan were true.

The description of Riukhin suggests that Bulgakov is hinting at the famous revolutionary poet of that time V.V.Mayakovsky. The expressions that help us to reach this conclusion are:

“Look at his lanky and melancholy personality and compare with his loud poems which he has written for the 1^st of May… ‘Get up!...and Scatter!’ and does he believe a single word of what he writes? Look into his heart and you will be shocked to see what he is thinking about!”

In ‘The Master and Margarita’ we often come across a loud voice on radio coming from all corners, all houses…that is Mayakovsky’s.

Bulgakov and Mayakovsky did not like each other and didn’t leave a chance to ridicule each other. Mayakovsky in his play “Bedbug” ridicules Bulgakov by depicting a scene where in his name was found in the dictionary of archaic words.

 Bulgakov also never spared Mayakovsky….

But while returning back to Moscow, Riukhin analyses his own situation and he realizes that his life has gone waste and now nothing is possible to mend there.

“ I am 32, and what next? May be I shall be writing a few poems every year…then what? Till how long? Till old age? What do these poems bring him? Fame? Oh, let me not cheat myself….fame never comes to them who create foolish poems. Why they are trash? I don’t believe a single word of what I write! Nothing is possible to change in my life….it has gone!”

Then the truck stops near a monument…. A man standing with his head down,       

“Here is the example of perfect talent! Whatever he did, in whatever situation he was pushed into, everything just helped him! Otherwise what is so captivating in those words, ‘Hazy storm…’? And that white soldier killed him and made immortal…

This is about Pushkin…

So, Bulgakov has shown the literary situation of 20’s – 30’s of 20^th century and compared the same with that of 19^th century, and also shown what it is that makes the poetry immortal!

Also note that the first day of our story ends here. Which day of the week is this, we are yet to know. The action has taken place in and around Patriarchy Ponds, Griboedov House which are near to each other and then it shifts to the Clinic at the outskirts of Moscow. Ivan is declared Schizophrenic…so both the predictions of Professor come true!

Ivan is kept in Room No 117 of the Clinic and he will soon be surrounded by many others.

Reading Master and Margarita - 05

Chapter 5

The matter was in Griboedov

House of Griboedov , where the office of MASSOLIT was located, is discussed in great detail. Bulgakov narrates what all used to take place in that house…

Massolit had settled itself at Griboedov's in the best and cosiest way imaginable. Anyone entering Griboedov's first of all became involuntarily acquainted with the announcements of various sports clubs, and with group as well as individual photographs of the members of Massolit, hanging (the photographs) on the walls of the staircase leading to the second floor.

On the door to the very first room of this upper floor one could see a big sign: 'Fishing and Vacation Section', along with the picture of a carp caught on a line.

On the door of room no. 2 something not quite comprehensible was written: 'One-day Creative Trips. Apply to M. V. Spurioznaya.'

The next door bore a brief but now totally incomprehensible inscription: 'Perelygino'. After which the chance visitor to Griboedov's would not know where to look from the motley inscriptions on the aunt's walnut doors: `Sign up for Paper with Poklevkina', `Cashier', 'Personal Accounts of Sketch-Writers'...

If one cut through the longest line, which already went downstairs and out to the doorman's lodge, one could see the sign 'Housing Question' on a door which people were crashing every second.

Beyond the housing question there opened out a luxurious poster on which a cliff was depicted and, riding on its crest, a horseman in a felt cloak with a rifle on his shoulder. A little lower – palm trees and a balcony; on the balcony - a seated young man with a forelock, gazing somewhere aloft with very lively eyes, holding a fountain pen in his hand.

The inscription: 'Full-scale Creative Vacations from Two Weeks (Story/Novella) to One Year (Novel/Trilogy). Yalta, Suuk-Su, Borovoe, Tsikhidziri, Makhindzhauri, Leningrad (Winter Palace).'

There was also a line at this door, but not an excessive one - some hundred and fifty people.

Next, obedient to the whimsical curves, ascents and descents of the Griboedov house, came the `Massolit Executive Board', 'Cashiers nos. 2, 3, 4, 5', 'Editorial Board', 'Chairman of Massolit', 'Billiard Room', various auxiliary institutions and, finally, that same hall with the colonnade where the aunt had delighted in the comedy of her genius nephew.

Any visitor finding himself in Griboedov's, unless of course he was a total dim-wit, would realize at once what a good life those lucky fellows, the Massolit members, were having, and black envy would immediately start gnawing at him. And he would immediately address bitter reproaches to heaven for not having endowed him at birth with literary talent, lacking which there was naturally no dreaming of owning a Massolit membership card, brown, smelling of costly leather, with a wide gold border - a card known to all Moscow.

Who will speak in defence of envy? This feeling belongs to the nasty category, but all the same one must put oneself in the visitor's position.

For what he had seen on the upper floor was not all, and was far from all.

The entire ground floor of the aunt's house was occupied by a restaurant, and what a restaurant! It was justly considered the best in Moscow. And not only because it took up two vast halls with arched ceilings, painted with violet, Assyrian-maned horses, not only because on each table there stood a lamp shaded with a shawl, not only because it was not accessible to just anybody coming in off the street, but because in the quality of its fare Griboedov's beat any restaurant in Moscow up and down, and this fare was available at the most reasonable, by no means onerous, price.

Now come to other things:

Why Griboedov’s name given to the Building? Bulgakov says that this House belonged to the aunt of famous writer Griboedov and that he used to read extracts from his play “Woe from Wit” (GORE OT UMA) to this aunt who would listen sitting on the sofa in the Hall with Columns. But Bulgakov immediately negates his own statement by saying, “We don’t know whether Griboedov had any such aunt who possessed such big, palatial house” and then he says, “whether there was such an aunt or not, we don’t know…whether he read her extracts from his play or did not read, we are not sure…may be he read, may be, he didn’t read”

This is again similar to Berlioz telling the Professor that though his story is interesting, it does not match with the one given in the Holy Bible…immediately we infer that the Yeshua-Pontius Pilate episode is not about the real Christ!

Same thing here.

But why Griboedov? The building which is referred to here is House of Gertsen…the name given to it by Bulgakov is Griboedov House. Again the same thing, concerned with thinking/intelligence. Griboedov’s play depicts how an educated/intelligent/thinking man suffers in the society where others were illiterates. Here the same thing is referred to for the society contemporary to Bulgakov.

Ivan Bezdomnyi arrives in Griboedov-House in search of Professor…

There were twelve writers waiting for Berlioz (the twelve disciples!)…while waiting for him in that small, suffocating room, while cursing Berlioz for being late, they pour out their frustration.

At half past ten on the evening when Berlioz died at the Patriarch's Ponds, only one room was lit upstairs at Griboedov's, and in it languished twelve writers who had gathered for a meeting and were waiting for Mikhail Alexandrovich.

Sitting on chairs, and on tables, and even on the two window-sills in the office of the Massolit executive board, they suffered seriously from the heat. Not a single breath of fresh air came through the open windows. Moscow was releasing the heat accumulated in the asphalt all day, and it was clear that night would bring no relief. The smell of onions came from the basement of the aunt's house, where the restaurant kitchen was at work, they were all thirsty, they were all nervous and angry.

The belletrist Beskudnikov - a quiet, decently dressed man with attentive and at the same time elusive eyes - took out his watch. The hand was crawling towards eleven. Beskudnikov tapped his finger on the face and showed it to the poet Dvubratsky, who was sitting next to him on the table and in boredom dangling his feet shod in yellow shoes with rubber treads.

'Anyhow,' grumbled Dvubratsky.

"The laddie must've got stuck on the Klyazma,' came the thick-voiced response of Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova, orphan of a Moscow merchant, who had become a writer and wrote stories about sea battles under the pen-name of Bos'n George.

'Excuse me!' boldly exclaimed Zagrivov, an author of popular sketches, 'but I personally would prefer a spot of tea on the balcony to stewing in here. The meeting was set for ten o'clock, wasn't it?'

'It's nice now on the Klyazma,' Bos'n George needled those present, knowing that Perelygino on the Klyazma, the country colony for writers, was everybody's sore spot. 'There's nightingales singing already. I always work better in the country, especially in spring.'

'It's the third year I've paid in so as to send my wife with goitre to this paradise, but there's nothing to be spied amidst the waves,' the novelist Ieronym Poprikhin said venomously and bitterly.

'Some are lucky and some aren't,' the critic Ababkov droned from the window-sill.

Bos'n George's little eyes lit up with glee, and she said, softening her contralto:

We mustn't be envious, comrades. There's twenty-two dachas in all, and only seven more being built, and there's three thousand of us in Massolit.'

`Three thousand one hundred and eleven,' someone put in from the corner.

'So you see,' the Bos'n went on, 'what can be done? Naturally, it's the most talented of us that got the dachas...'

'The generals!' Glukharev the scenarist cut right into the squabble.

Beskudnikov, with an artificial yawn, walked out of the room.

'Five rooms to himself in Perelygino,' Glukharev said behind him.

`Lavrovich has six to himself,' Deniskin cried out, `and the dining room's panelled in oak!'

'Eh, that's not the point right now,' Ababkov droned, 'it's that it's half past eleven.'

A clamour arose, something like rebellion was brewing. They started telephoning hated Perelygino, got the wrong dacha, Lavrovich's, found out that Lavrovich had gone to the river, which made them totally upset. They called at random to the commission on fine literature, extension 950, and of course found no one there.

'He might have called!' shouted Deniskin, Glukharev and Quant.

And when the famous Jazz began, they came down to have ‘something’. Suddenly there comes the news about Berlioz’s death. The Jazz stops, people stop eating and drinking for a few minutes and then slowly resume it by saying, how can we help it? Why to throw away Vodka? He is dead but we are still alive and we should eat to live. A bitter truth!

Pay attention to the manager of Griboedov’s house.

And at midnight there came an apparition in hell. A handsome dark-eyed man with a dagger-like beard, in a tailcoat, stepped on to the veranda and cast a regal glance over his domain. They used to say, the mystics used to say, that there was a time when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a wide leather belt with pistol butts sticking from it, and his raven hair was tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig sailed the Caribbean under a black death flag with a skull and crossbones.

But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no desperate freebooters sail them, no corvette chases after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the waves. There is nothing, and there was nothing! There is that sickly linden over there; there is the cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it... And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone's bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you're afraid, afraid... Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!...

Bulgakov suggests and then immediately refutes that he was a pirate! But it is interesting to note the background of people who were now creating proletarian literature/protecting proletarian writers.

Note the reaction of people on seeing Ivan with the Icon, the candle and his funny attire. Note how the manager Archibald Archibaldovich scolds the watchman for allowing Ivan into the Griboedov.

All the while the waiters were tying up the poet with napkins, a conversation was going on in the coatroom between the commander of the brig and the doorman.

'Didn't you see he was in his underpants?' the pirate inquired coldly.

'But, Archibald Archibaldovich,' the doorman replied, cowering, 'how could I not let him in, if he's a member of Massolit?' 'Didn't you see he was in his underpants?' the pirate repeated. 'Pardon me, Archibald Archibaldovich,' the doorman said, turning purple, 'but what could I do? I understand, there are ladies sitting on the veranda...'

`Ladies have nothing to do with it, it makes no difference to the ladies,' the pirate replied, literally burning the doorman up with his eyes, 'but it does to the police! A man in his underwear can walk the streets of Moscow only in this one case, that he's accompanied by the police, and only to one place - the police station! And you, if you're a doorman, ought to know that on seeing such a man, you must, without a moment's delay, start blowing your whistle. Do you hear? Do you hear what's going on on the veranda?'

Here the half-crazed doorman heard some sort of hooting coming from the veranda, the smashing of dishes and women's screams.

'Now, what's to be done with you for that?' the freebooter asked.

The skin on the doorman's face acquired a typhoid tinge, his eyes went dead. It seemed to him that the black hair, now combed and parted, was covered with flaming silk. The shirt-front and tailcoat disappeared and a pistol butt emerged, tucked into a leather belt. The doorman pictured himself hanging from the fore-topsail yard. His eyes saw his own tongue sticking out and his lifeless head lolling on his shoulder, and even heard the splash of waves against the hull. The doorman's knees gave way. But here the freebooter took pity on him and extinguished his sharp gaze.

`Watch out, Nikolai, this is the last time! We have no need of such doormen in the restaurant.

Go find yourself a job as a beadle.' Having said this, the commander commanded precisely, clearly, rapidly: `Get Pantelei from the snack bar. Police. Protocol. A car. To the psychiatric clinic.' And added: 'Blow your whistle!'

Note the puffy face who was asking Ivan in his very ear the name of Professor. 

Note the poet Riukhin.

More about Riukhin in next chapter.

By the end of this chapter Ivan is bundled into a truck and taken away to the Clinic of Dr Stravinsky about which the Professor had already predicted in the Patriarchy Park.