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Commentary






the pain in my knee—a Faustian reference to a sabbath on the Brocken, the location for Goethe's Walpurgisnacht. Traditionally, however, it is said that the devil is lame because of his fall from heaven.

My grandmother—a play on words, since a common negative Russian expression is " the devil's grandmother."

A war has broken out—very likely the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936.

Abaddon—" the destroyer, " the Hebrew name for the Greek Apollyon, angel of the bottomless pit.

CHAPTER 23

Picture of a poodle on a heavy chain—another Faustian reference; Mephistophe-les takes the form of a poodle at one point. However, this is also displaced Gospel material, since, unlike Yeshua, Margarita does go through her version of the Stations of the Cross with something heavy around her neck.

Margarita found herself in a tropical forest—these extravagant details of the ever-changing ball scene, which appears to be both an updating of a witches' sabbath and a version of the classic ball scenes to be found in nineteenth-century Russian literature, actually has its source in the author's own life. Bulgakov and his wife attended a ball at the American embassy in 1935, which in terms of everyday life in 1930s Moscow was truly amazing, since it featured live bears and birds, and lavish musical entertainment as well as an enormous amount of food and drink—and a few well-known informers as well.

Vleuxtemps—Henri Vieuxtcmps (1820-81) was a Belgian musician and composer who performed in Russia.

Monsieur Jacques—like many of the ball guests, who tend to be either well-documented malefactors, such as medieval poisoners, or fall in the more ambiguous category of alchemists, this character has a historical prototype. Jacques Coeur was argentier to the French king Charles VII (1403-61), and after a successful career was said to be an alchemist, counterfeiter, and traitor, and was rumored to have poisoned the king's mistress, Agnes Sorel (who actually died of dysentery).

Count Robert—Robert Dudley Leicester, the lover of Queen Elizabeth I of England, a man suspected of having poisoned his wife.

Signora Tofana (also Toffana)—a legendary poisoner. Aqua Tofana was one of the names for a poison popular in seventeenth-century southern Italy. This school of poisoners (there were several Tofanas) was based in Sicily and Naples. The most notorious among them was Signora Tofana, who was responsible for hundreds of deaths. The poison was placed in special vials bearing the picture of a saint, which were sold freely as a cosmetic, since arsenic (although some think it was opium) was said to help the complexion. Those wives who knew the contents could use it as poison, and the result was a wave of poisonings of husbands by wives.

stuffed the handkerchief in his mouth-------- this character blends features of

Goethe's Gretchen with those of her real-life inspiration, Susanna Brandt, who was convicted of murdering her child, another scholar's joke. Since her name here is Frieda, some have also seen a link to a real-life patient, Frieda Keller, described in Sexual Questions, by the Swiss psychologist Forel.

Think of me not as a cat, but as a fish...—in Russian the phrase quiet as a mouse becomes quiet as a fish on ire.

The marquise—the Marquise de Brinvilliers was beheaded in 1676 for poisoning her father. When her father had her lover put in the Bastille, the lover befriended inmates with knowledge of poisons, specifically ones hard to trace. She poisoned her fa- Commentary 353


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