Lesson 1. Interesting passages and hidden meanings

After Berlioz's death, living space opens up in Building No. 302-bis, in the bad apartment No. 50, and people line up to see Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoi, chairman of the tenants' association. Koroviev (calling himself “the interpreter of the foreigner Woland”) invites Bosoi to the apartment, talks him into renting it to Woland, and promptly slips him a bribe. The chapter rests on a famous formula Woland states later: the housing question has spoiled Muscovites. Housing in 1930s Moscow was desperately scarce; communal apartments, residence permits, “consolidation” (moving strangers into a family's flat), and denunciations for an extra room were routine. Bulgakov himself fought for an apartment for years. So Woland and his retinue use greed for living space as a loophole: a man who will cheat for rooms is the devil's easiest catch.

Koroviev gives Bosoi money “for the trouble,” on top of the official rent. Bosoi hides the bribe in the air vent in the lavatory. At once the phone rings: an anonymous voice reports that the chairman is hiding foreign currency. The key “prank”: during the search, the rubles Koroviev paid turn into dollars. Keeping foreign currency was a criminal offense in the USSR, and this turns a petty bribe-taker into a “currency dealer,” a man facing a far graver charge. The forces of evil act not by violence but through the system itself: plant the evidence, make an anonymous denunciation, and the Soviet machine will destroy the man. Note Bulgakov's black humor here: a real sin is punished (Bosoi really did take a bribe), but the punishing machinery of denunciation, search, and arrest is shown as just as demonic as Woland's retinue itself.

— “Bosoi” is a telling name (“Bosoi” means “barefoot”): the house committee chairman is a money-grubber, yet at the end he is left literally naked and barefoot, stripped of both money and position. His first name and patronymic, Nikanor Ivanovich, stress how ordinary he is, a typical acquisitive Soviet official. — Koroviev appears here as a petty demon-tempter: his courtesy, obligingness, and legal “correctness” (a contract, a receipt) parody the bureaucratic language of the era. — The satire targets not one man but a system of fear: one phone call “to the proper place” is enough to set the machinery of repression in motion. Bulgakov, who had lived through persecution and searches, knew full well the cost of an anonymous denunciation, and he makes it the devil's weapon.