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Ioann from Kronstadt—Archpriest Ioann of Kronstadt (1829-1908) was a famed preacher who was also said to be a miracle worker.






Zubrovka—Polish bison-grass vodka.

Ryukhin—this name is a negative one, having at its root the meaning to crash, fall down.

cabdriver—the driver of a horse-drawn carriage. In this case the Russian is likhach, meaning the highest class of the three classes of cabbies competing against taxis in the late 1920s in the capital.

CHAPTER 6

wrecker—a key political code word for the period, meaning a person who actively worked against the regime, damaging equipment, etc. not unlike the similar " sabo-


Commentary

teur" (who sabotaged less actively, by not working, for example), the always popular " enemy of the people, " " kulak" (rich peasant), etc. Politically correct people were encouraged to seek out such persons and " unmask" them to the authorities. The result was sometimes arrest.

Soar,.. Unfurl—these poems arc clearly paeans to the Soviet banner.

metal man on a pedestal—reference to the statue of Pushkin on Pushkin Square. This jealous, Soviet second-rate poet is to some degree an amalgam of a number of figures, but he is clearly meant to at least partially evoke Mayakovsky, the poet of the Revolution. As he looks at the statue and broods about'why Pushkin got famous (" Storm with mist" is a line from a famous poem by Pushkin, much loved by Bulgakov), there is a connection to Mayakovsky's poem " Jubilee" (1924), in which Mayakovsky revises his previously negative view of the great poet. Although Bulgakov and Mayakovsky had opposing views of Russian culture, all evidence indicates that Bulgakov nevertheless thought Mayakovsky, whom he knew personally, was a real poet, unlike Ryukhin. Ryukhin is of such primitive culture that he refers to the man who killed Pushkin in a duel in 1837 as a while guard, a contemporary term of abuse, meaning those who fought on the side of the monarchy during the Russian Civil War, a term which actually applies to Bulgakov who was briefly on the White side after the Revolution. Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930 (an event which much struck Bulgakov), had earlier referred to Bulgakov satirically in his play The Bedbug, and this appears to be Bulgakov's settling of accounts with him.

Abrau champagne—Soviet champagne, usually known by its full name as Abrau Dyurso.

CHAPTER 7

LUthodeyev—derived from an old noun meaning " evil-doer." Styopa (nickname for Stepan) and his hangover parallel that of the state and the character of Suva Oblonsky in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Six-storey building on Sadovaya Street—Bulgakov has located the evil apartment in the building he lived in during his wretched early years in Moscow, when he and his wife lived in a communal apartment with a motley group of people who were to inspire some of his most negative portraits.

people started disappearing—although the casual reader might not really focus on it, disappearance, arrest, interrogation, and punishment occur suprisingly often in this work (although often displaced to the Pilate chapters), reflecting well-known features of everyday life as the 1930s wore on. Bulgakov is consciously mixing details and atmosphere of the two decades, since he began the novel in 1928, and worked on it throughout the 1930s. Arrests became much more widespread among the people he knew, or knew of, after the killing of Kirov in 1934 which triggered massive " reprisals" (some evidence indicates that Stalin had the popular boss of Leningrad killed himself). Bulgakov's friends were not spared, and it was common to have a suitcase packed in advance in case of a knock on the door in the middle of the night. The narrator is amusingly ingenuous here when referring to obviously politically motivated acts as witchcraft. Such events were nonetheless mysterious in reality in that no logical reasons were required for someone to be held or arrested.


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