4 findirector: Typical Soviet contraction for financial director.
5 an enormous wax seal: Styopa immediately assumes that Berlioz has been arrested, hence his ’disagreeable thoughts’ about whether he may have compromised himself with the editor and thus be in danger of arrest himself.
6 Azazello: Bulgakov adds an Italian ending to the Hebrew name Azazel (‘goat god’), to whom a goat (the scapegoat or ‘goat for Azazel’) bearing the sins of the people was sacrificed on Yom Kippur by being sent into the wilderness to die (Leviticus 16:7 — 10).
Chapter 9: Koroviev’s Stunts
1 chairman of the tenants’ association: This quasi-official position gave its occupant enormous power, considering the permanent shortage of living space, which led to all sorts of crookedness and bribe-taking. Bulgakov portrays knavish house chairmen in several works, having suffered a good deal from them in his search for quarters during the twenties and thirties. This chairman’s name, Bosoy, means ‘Barefoot’.
2 speculating in foreign currency: The Soviet rouble was not a convertible currency, and the government therefore had great need of foreign currency for trade purposes. Soviet citizens were forbidden to keep foreign currency, and there were also several ‘round-ups’ of gold and jewellery during the thirties. Speculating in currency could even be a capital offence. This situation plays a role in several later episodes of the novel.
Chapter 10: News from Yalta
1 Varenukha: His name is that of a drink made from honey, berries and spices boiled in vodka.
2 A super-lightning telegram: Bulgakov’s exaggeration of the ‘lightning telegram’, which did exist.
3 A false Dmitri: The notorious impostor Grigory (‘Grishka’) Otrepev, known as ‘the false Dmitri’, was a defrocked monk of the seventeenth century who claimed the Russian throne by pretending to be the prince Dmitri, murdered son of Ivan the Terrible.
4 rocks, my refuge ...: Words from the romance ‘Refuge’, with music by Franz Schubert (1797-1828), inspired by Goethe’s Faust.
5 take it there personalty: Another oblique reference to the secret police. By now the reader should recognize the manner.
Chapter 12: Black Magic and Its Exposure
1 Louisa: The character Louisa Miller, from Schiller’s play Intrigue and Love, a fixture in the repertories of Soviet theatres.
Chapter 13: The Hero Enters
1 A state bond: Soviet citizens were ‘asked’ to buy state bonds at their places of work. As an incentive, lotteries would be held every so often in which certain bond numbers would win a significant amount of money. Secure places being scarce in communal living conditions, the master evidently kept his bond in his laundry basket
2 Latunsky ... Ariman ... Lavrovich: Russian commentators see the name Latunsky as a fusion of the names of critics O. Litovsky and A. Orlinsky, who led the attack on ’Bulgakovism’ in the mid-twenties, after the first performances of Bulgakov’s play Days of the Turbins. Ariman (Ahriman), name of the principle of evil in the Zoroastrian religion, has also been identified by commentators with L. L. Averbakh, general secretary of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), one of Bulgakov’s fiercest opponents. And Lavrovich is thought to be V. V. Vishnevsky, who forced the withdrawal of two of Bulgakov’s plays from the repertory of the Moscow Art Theatre.
3 an article by the critic Ariman: It was common practice in Soviet literary politics to mount a press campaign against a book after denying it publication. The same happened at the end of the fifties with Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
4 A Militant Old Believer: The Old Believers broke with the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century, in protest against the reforms of the patriarch Nikon. The term is thus used rather loosely by Latunsky. In the mid-twenties, Bulgakov was similarly attacked as ‘a militant white guard’.
5 in the same coat but with the buttons torn off: This laconic reference is the only indication of where the master spent those lost three months. It was customary to remove belts, shoelaces and buttons from the apparel of those ‘held for questioning’.
Chapter 15: Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream
1 after first visiting another place: Noteworthy is not only the impersonality of the interrogation that follows, but the combination in the interrogating voice of menace and ‘tenderness’ (a word Bulgakov uses frequently in this context). The same combination will reappear in Nikanor Ivanovich’s dream — an extraordinary rendering of the operation of secret police within society, which also suggests the ’theatre’ of Stalin’s trumped-up ‘show trials’ of the later thirties.
2 Quinquet lamps: A specially designed oil-lamp, named for its French inventor, in which the oil reservoir is higher than the wick. Like carbon arc lamps in apartment hallways, they were a means of saving electricity.
