Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi, arrested over “foreign currency” (chapter 9), is so shaken that he too ends up in Stravinsky's clinic. The dollars found on him have vanished, he can explain nothing, and the doctors declare him mentally ill. He dreams that he and others are brought to a theater where an emcee gently but insistently urges the audience to hand over their foreign currency voluntarily. This is the chapter's satirical heart. In the guise of “theater,” Bulgakov shows how gold and currency were squeezed out of people (the Torgsin stores, which sold goods for gold and currency, and campaigns to surrender valuables). The emcee's absurd politeness and promise of no harm parody state coercion disguised as goodwill.

In the dream the actor Savva Potapovich Kurolesov comes on stage and declaims with grand theatrical fervor, among other things from Pushkin's “The Covetous Knight,” about gold hoarded to no purpose. High literature is pressed into the service of propaganda here: the classics are recited to shame the “hoarders” and coax their valuables out of them. This is subtle satire on how culture and art become an instrument of pressure. The very name “Kurolesov” (from the Russian kurolesit, “to play the fool”) hints at the farce of it all. The dream mixes real signs of the era (campaigns to surrender currency, threats and promises) with theatrical absurdity, and the mix is more frightening than a direct description: the machinery of repression is shown as an absurd but inescapable performance that no one can walk out of.

The chapter looks like an inserted episode: it barely moves the main plot. But it has an important role. First, it is a breathing space, an interlude between two tense storylines: the horrors at the Variety (chapter 14) and the tragic execution in Yershalaim (chapter 16). Second, it deepens the running satire on Soviet daily life: the theme of money, denunciations, fear, and coercion that began with Bosoi in chapter 9. The device of “a dream within the novel” matters too. In Bulgakov the line between waking life, a sick man's delirium, and otherworldly interference is deliberately blurred: it is unclear whether this is the simple nightmare of an exhausted man or an illusion sent by Woland's retinue. This instability is a hallmark of the novel, where Moscow's reality keeps threatening to turn into devilry.