Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

The chapter closes Part One of the novel with a string of “visitors” drawn to apartment No. 50 by a thirst for gain. First comes Berlioz's uncle, Maximilian Poplavsky, who has rushed in from Kyiv not for his nephew's funeral but for the Moscow living space. The telegram that lured him was signed by the “late” Berlioz: a grim joke by the retinue. Behemoth the cat fussily checks his documents, a parody of Soviet bureaucracy and its cult of the “piece of paper.” Poplavsky is thrown out in disgrace: an apartment in Moscow is stronger than family feeling, and the forces of evil see that perfectly well. Greed here is the surest road to disaster.

Next comes the Variety's barman, Andrei Fokich Sokov, to complain that the ten-ruble notes from his till have turned into cut paper. Woland caustically scolds him for the “sturgeon of second-grade freshness”: the famous line (freshness comes in one grade only: the first, which is also the last) is really about honesty and about fakery in everything. The key moment: the retinue tells Sokov, almost in passing, that he will die in nine months of liver cancer. This is a turn from satire to something serious. The money the barman hides “in various places” will be of no use to him. Here, for the first time in the Moscow chapters, the theme of death and the futility of hoarding sounds at full voice, along with a hint of Woland's omniscience: he knows everyone's appointed time.

Frightened by the prophecy, Sokov runs to Professor Kuzmin, and the forces of evil catch up with the doctor himself: the fee (those same ten-ruble notes) turns into labels from bottles of Abrau-Durso sparkling wine, a black kitten appears where the labels lay, and a sparrow dances on his desk. The miracle does not stop at the walls of apartment No. 50; it spreads across all of Moscow. So Part One closes: the Moscow world has finally come off its usual axis. Everyone who came into contact with Woland out of self-interest or unbelief is punished. The novel pauses before turning in Part Two from satire to its heroine, Margarita.