7. A naughty apartment

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Stepan (Styopa) Bogdanovich Likhodeev

Styopa  Likhodeev is director of the Variety Theatre who wakes up with an hangover and sees that Woland is waiting for him. He lives in the notorious apartment 50, together with the unfortunate Berlioz. Лиходей (Likhodieï) means scoundrel, blackguard, villain or rogue.

Click here to read a comprehensive description of Likhodeev

A big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on Sadovaya Street

A difficult case, this sentence. Which is due to just one simple Russian word: покой (pokoy). Bulgakov's original text presents Styopa’s house as follows: "… в большом шестиэтажном доме, покоем расположенном на садовой улице." I tried - and I must admit, it was with more than just a little help from my dictionary - to translate it as: "… in a big house of five storeys, peacefully situated in Sadovaya street.”

But the English translators Richard Pevear and his spouse Larissa Volokhonsky had another point of view. They had not translated the word покоем (pokoyem) - a declined form of the word покой (pokoy), which means peaceful. But instead, they had apparently read somewhere that the building was U-shaped, because they wrote about: "… a big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on Sadovaya Street ".

But, according to my dictionary, the term u-shaped is normally translated in Russian as подковообразный (podkovoyobrazny). So I decided to look at other translations as well and guess what? Nobody uses the word peaceful, and the Dutch translators Marko Fondse and Aai Prins seemed to have seen also a “five-storeyed, U-shaped building” too. And this seemed to be due to this word: покой (pokoy).

Because the word покой seems to have another meaning besides peaceful. Until about 1900 the Russians used the Church Slavonic names to indicate the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. And the Church Slavonic name for the letter which is now known as Pe, and written as П was… покой (pokoy).

So the Russian text could possibly have been translated as: "… a six-storeyed, П-shaped building on Sadovaya Street”.

But since the letter П does not exist in our alphabet, Pevear and Volokhonsky, just like Fondse and Prins, simply turned it upside down by making it a U. The French translators, just like the English translator Michael Glenny solved this problem in a rather pragmatic way. They did not translate the word покой at all, as if it wasn’t in the source text.

But the translators obviously never saw the house on Sadovaya street because, if they had, they would have known that the building was not П-shaped, but in a rectangular shape, with a completely surrounded patio. And so it was in Bulgakov's time. But, different from today, it was a very peaceful neighbourhood. In front of the building, like on many places on the Garden Ring, there was a very broad footway with trees and bushes... very much покой (pokoj) thus...

One more observation: the attentive reader may have noticed that the Dutch translator counted five storeys, and the English translator counted six. In Bulgakov's text is written шестиэтажном (shestiyetazhnom) or six storeys. The English and French translators take this literarily and write about six storeys too. This confusion is due to the fact that in Russia the ground floor is considered as the first floor. So the building has six floors: five storeys and the ground floor.

Click here to read more about the house on Bolshaya Sadovaya
Click here to see a 360° photo of Bolshaya Sadovaya

Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray

Click here to read more about this character

Belomut

I don't know (yet) if there exists a real prototype for this character.

On a day off

During the first Five-year Plan the Soviet government experimented a few times with the calendar. In the period of the Eternal Calendar the weekly days of rest were spread. Enterprises could decide on which day their labourers had their day off.  In 1939 the seven-day week was restored.

Click here to read more of it on the Calendar Issues page

People began to disappear

Here, as throughout The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov treats the everyday Soviet phenomenon of disappearances (arrests) and other activities of the secret police in the most vague, impersonal and hushed manner. The main example is the arrest of the master himself in Chapter 13, which passes almost without mention.

Aspirin

In the Russian version Styopa is asking for a пирамидона (Pyramidon). Pyramidon is a medicine against pain and fever of the same type as aspirin.

Here I am!

Bulgakov quotes – in Russian translation: “Вот и я!” – which are the exact words said by Mephistopheles when he first appeared  to Faust in the opera Faust, written by the French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1895): “Me voici!”.  It was also one of the first working titles for The Master and Margarita.

Click here to see Mephistoteles' appearance to Faust in the opera
Click here to read more about the other working titles of the novel

Skhodnya

Сходня (Skhodnya) is  a suburb north of Moscow.

Professor of black magic Woland

Woland introduces himself to Styopa with a German name for Satan, which appears in several variants in the old Faust legends, Woland, Faland, Wieland…

Click here for a comprehensive description of Woland

Findirector

финдиректор (findirector) is a typical Soviet contraction for financial director - the Soviet language was interspersed with such expressions, like Massolit, Dramlit, Nakompros, Komsomol and much more.

An enormous wax seal

A seal on the door was, in general, the sign that someone was arrested and his possessions were sealed for further investigation. That is why Styopa is afraid of some dubious conversation he had with Berlioz “on some unnecessary subject”. Styopa immediately assumes that Berlioz has been arrested, hence his “disagreeable thoughts” about whether he may have compromised himself with the editor and thus be in danger of arrest himself.

Voronezh

Воронеж (Voronezh) is a big city in the south of Russia, not far from Ukraine. In the period that Bulgakov worked on The Master and Margarita it had an explosive expansion. It grew from 120.000 people (1926) to 345.000 (1939). And the growth would not stop, because today there are some 850.000 people living in Voronezh.

Azazello

Bulgakov adds an Italian ending to the Hebrew name Azazel, a demon who lived in the wilderness.

Click here to read more about Azazello

Yalta

The city of Ялта (Yalta) is located on the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. The city is known by the Conference of Yalta, which took place in February 1945. That meeting place was chosen because Stalin refused to travel farther than the Black Sea Resort. In Yalta the spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union after the war were defined. They would last for about 45 years.



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