Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

The action moves to the Variety Theater. The financial director, Grigory Danilovich Rimsky, and the administrator, Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha, are puzzled about where the director, Stepan Likhodeyev, has gone; that morning Woland flung him out of Moscow straight to Yalta. Telegrams from Yalta arrive in the office one after another: a man insists he is Stepa Likhodeyev and asks them to confirm his identity. Rimsky doesn't believe it: that very morning Likhodeyev had phoned from Moscow, and no one could cover that distance in a few hours in the 1930s. An absurd but frightening situation arises: the facts defy common sense, yet they can't be explained rationally. The chapter masterfully builds anxiety through an everyday detail: the telegraph tape.

Notice the structural device: Bulgakov shows no outright miracle but wears down the hero and the reader with uncertainty. Rimsky first decides that Likhodeyev flew off to Yalta on a drunken whim, then realizes it's impossible. His thoughts race, and out of this panic grows a sense of looming disaster. It is symbolic that the action moves toward evening and night: the light fades, darkness thickens, and with it the power of the forces of evil grows. In the novel the motif of approaching night is always tied to Woland: by day one can still doubt, by night the monstrous becomes plain. Chapter 10 is the calm before the storm, a buildup to the black magic show (chapter 12) and the night attack on Rimsky himself (chapter 14).

Annoyed by the telegrams, Varenukha decides to take them “to the proper place,” that is, to the secret police, and expose the fraud. He leaves the theater in the gathering dusk, in the rain, heading for the building across the street, and on the way stops at the lavatory of the summer garden. There a fat man with a cat's face (Behemoth) and a short, fanged, red-haired man (Azazello) ambush him: the administrator is beaten and carried off. This begins Varenukha's change into a vampire scout, which pays off in chapter 14. Bulgakov breaks off the line halfway on purpose: the reader doesn't yet know Varenukha's fate, and the suspense is left hanging. So the novel stitches chapters into one web: a small detail (“went to take the telegrams”) proves a fateful turn.