Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

The chapter begins with the investigation trying to make sense of what happened in Moscow: the disappearances, the scandal at the Variety, Berlioz's death. The investigators are sober, materialist minds, and that is the source of the comedy: they look for a gang of hypnotists and ventriloquists and refuse to believe the obvious. Here Bulgakov mocks the dogmatic rationalism of the Soviet era, a mindset in which admitting the inexplicable is impossible on principle. The more logically the investigation proceeds, the more absurd its results look: testimonies don't match, evidence evaporates, a cat fires a Browning. This continues the argument begun in the very first chapter at Patriarch's Ponds, where Berlioz tried to prove to Woland that there is no devil. The whole novel answers that thesis: you may not believe in the forces of evil, but that does not stop them from turning your life upside down.

The chapter's climax is the armed squad's raid on apartment No. 50 and the phantasmagorical shootout with Behemoth. The cat holds conversations, declares that “a cat is an ancient and sacrosanct animal,” hangs from the chandelier; they shoot at him and cannot hit him, and he returns fire. Behind the buffoonery lies a serious subtext. The scene parodies a search and arrest, which in the 1930s happened at night in every building. Armed men burst into the apartment but cannot overcome the forces of evil: for the first time the “organs” (the secret police) turn out to be powerless. For Bulgakov's contemporaries it was a desperate fantasy about a power beyond the reach of the all-powerful apparatus. Then Behemoth starts a fire, splashing gasoline over everything: apartment No. 50, the center of Moscow's devilry, vanishes in flames. For Bulgakov fire is a purifying element; the same logic is at work in the burning of Griboyedov House and in the novel's finale.

By this chapter many characters have already vanished or suffered: some have been carried thousands of kilometers away, some are in the clinic, some have been made a laughingstock. The theme of sudden disappearances runs through the whole novel, and to a reader of the 1930s it sounded ominously familiar: people really did disappear then; they were taken away at night and vanished without a trace. Bulgakov shifts this terrible experience into a fantastic register. In his book people are carried off not by the “black raven” (the secret police's prison van) but by Woland's retinue, and nearly all of them are eventually returned alive. This is bitter irony: the devilish power turns out to be more merciful than the earthly one. Through laughter the writer speaks of what could not be said aloud. That is why the novel is called an encoded testimony of its era: the realities of the terror are dressed in the garments of magical satire.