Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

That afternoon Margarita received a magic cream from Azazello and accepted a strange invitation: to visit a certain distinguished foreigner that evening. Rubbing herself with the cream, she is transformed: she grows younger and more beautiful, and her body becomes weightless. This is not just a cosmetic miracle but an initiation, a passage into another state. What matters is that Margarita does this consciously and joyfully. In Bulgakov, becoming a witch is not a fall but a liberation: the burden of conventions, lies, and a hateful “respectable” life falls away from her. She laughs out loud and feels lightness and freedom. The deal with diabolical forces is presented not as a sin but as an act of love and courage.

Having gained her power, Margarita leaves her husband a note: she is leaving; grief and misfortune have made her a witch. Her old life is over. The heroine's nakedness here is not an erotic gesture but a symbol: the witch sheds her clothes as one sheds a former self; she is now free of everything superficial. Just as famous is the related revenge storyline: later, during her flight, Margarita wrecks the luxurious apartment of Latunsky, the critic whose articles destroyed the Master's novel. Literary persecution, Bulgakov's own real pain (critics hounded him too), gets a fantastic revenge in the novel.

The miracle is contagious: the maid Natasha also rubs herself with the cream and becomes a witch, and the cream (with her help) turns the neighbor, Nikolai Ivanovich, into a hog, on which she flies away. This is pure folklore: witches, flights, shape-shifting, the witches' sabbath. Bulgakov draws on Slavic and European beliefs about witches who rub themselves with a magic ointment and fly to the sabbath. But he fills the old story with new meaning: his “forces of evil” punish philistinism and vulgarity (the respectable Nikolai Ivanovich turned into a hog is a caricature of the ordinary philistine) and give freedom to those capable of love. The scene blends laughter, fantasy, and serious thought on the price and reward of freedom.