4. The Chase

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Clickable map

On this website, you can find a clickable map on which you can follow Ivan's chase in the streets of Moscow.

Click here to follow Ivan's chase

The "A"-line

There are many streetcar lines in Moscow. They are all numbered, except for one which is indicated with the letter "A". This line, which is now called "Annushka", has one particular car which is called Трактиръ Аннушка (Traktir Annushka) or Café Annushka, and which serves as a restaurant.

Click here to see the Café Annushka

Number 15, apartment 47

Ivan suddenly realizes that the professor must "unfailingly" be found in house no. 15, and most assuredly in apartment 47. First of all there's apparently a little mistake, because in Bulgakov's original text is written number 13, apartment 47. Bulgakov actually describes the apartment of his friends the Liamins. Nikolai Nikolaevich Liamin, literary scholar and translator, and Natalia Abramovna Liamina-Ushakova, his artist-wife, lived at Savelievsky pereulok 12, apartment. 66.

The story of the Liamins will come back later in the novel, in Nikanor Ivanovich's dream in chapter 15.

Primuses

"On the oven silently stood about a dozen extinguished primuses". The shortage of living space after the revolution led to the typical Soviet phenomenon of the communal apartment, in which several families would have one or two private rooms and share kitchen and toilet facilities. The primus stove, a portable one-burner stove fuelled with pressurized benzene, made its appearance at the same time and became a symbol of communal-apartment life. Each family would have its own primus.

The primus will play an important role further on in The Master and Margarita, when Koroviev and Behemoth bid Moscow farewell.

Two wedding candles

In the Orthodox marriage service, the bride and groom stand during the ceremony holding lighted candles. These are special, large, often decorated candles, and are customarily kept indefinitely after the wedding, sometimes in the corner with the family icon.

The Moscow River amphitheatre

The place "on the granite steps of the Moscow River amphitheatre", where Ivan dives swallow-fashion into the water, is at the foot of what had been the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. "Had been", because in 1931, while Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita, the cathedral was dynamited by the Soviet regime. The remaining granite steps and amphitheatre were originally a grand baptismal font at the riverside, popularly known as the Jordan. The cathedral has now been rebuilt.

The incongruous bathing of Ivan can be assimilated with a christening. From this instant, Ivan is not any more the same.

Click here to read the story of the cathedral

Yevgeny Onegin

Yevgeny Onegin is a great novel in verse written by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837), wich inspired Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) to write an opera of the same name, of which the libretto is written by the composer's brother Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1850-1916). Tatyana, mentioned further on, is the heroine of Yevgeny Onegin.

Yevgeny Onegin is a symbol of the classical Russian culture that Ivan and his fellows professionaly rejected. He is invited by this music to feel sorry for the hero of the opera, to find again what he had humiliated, and to reconcile with his roots. The polonaise comes from all the houses at the same time - they were equipped with radio's with one unique programme. With this description Bulgakov shows the standardization of culture in the Soviet society.

Click here to listen to "the hoarse roar" of the polonaise from the opera

A Tolstoy blouse

A Tolstoy blouse or Tolstoy shirt is a traditional full Russian shirt with the collar opening on one side of the neck. The original name is косоворотка (kosovorotka) or skew-collared. It came to be associated with Tolstoy, who liked to dress in peasant costume and mow the meadow with his peasants. Hence the name тольстовка (tolstovka). Since they were non-Western, such shirts were at various times signs of Russian nationalism.



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