17. An unquiet Day

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Vassily Stepanovich Lastochkin

Vassily Stepanovich Lastochkin, the bookkeeper of the Variety Theatre is modest and quiet man who, unexpectedly, by the disappearance of the o-ther directors, now turns out to be the senior member of the whole Variety team. Which he will regret at the end of the chapter…

A queue of many thousands clung in two rows, its tail reaching to Ku-drinskaya Square

Кудринская площадь, or Kudrinskaya square is situated at the intersec-tion of Sadovaya Kudrinskaya (the continuation of Bolshaya Sadovaya ulit-sa) and Bolshaya Nikitskaya ulitsa. So there were two rows waiting in a long line indeed, about one kilometer.

The famous Ace of Diamonds

Bulgakov’s police dog is called Тузбубен (Tuzbubyen) in Russian. Туз means ace and бубен diamonds. Tuzbubyen or Ace of Diamonds is pro-bably a strange name for a police dog, but we don’t need to search much for the explanation. It’s a parody of a famous pre-revolutionary real police dog called Треф (Tref), which means Clubs.

In Bulgakov’s archive was found a newspaper cutting from the Pravda of November 6, 1921, about the experiences of Lenin in the summer of 1917, when he had to escape to Finland for a while. In that newspaper article we can read that not only the counterintelligence and police detectives were brought into action to track Lenin, but also dogs, among which the famous police dog Tref.

Faland

Faland is actually the German form of Woland's name that appears in Faust.

Got any threes?

Just like in chapter 12 the Russian chervonets is translated here as ten-rouble bill. In the conversation between Vassily Stepanovich Lastochkin and the cab driver Bulgakov plays again with the “unreliable” chervonets and the “solid” rouble. The driver refuses to accept ten-rouble bills (cher-vontsi) but treshkas - three-rouble bills - are welcome.

Click here to read more about the monetary issues in the Soviet Union
Read more about the difference between a chervonets and a ten-rouble bill

A label from a seltzer bottle

In the original Russian text Bulgakov didn’t talk about ordinary seltzer. He also mentions the brand. The labels are from bottles of the Вода мине-рала нарзан or Narzan mineral water. Since 1894 this water is bottled in Kislovodsk, a city in the region of Stavropol in Ukraine.

In Bulgakov’s time Narzan water has been associated with this sunny re-sort town in the North Caucasus for more than a century, comparable to the Spa water in Belgium or Vittel in France. But in the chaos of post-commu-nist Russia, the eminent old plant had to stoop to producing cheap junk. Counterfeiters tried to rip off the Narzan label.

When communism collapsed, Narzan had immaterial assets that most other domestic enterprises could only dream of - a pre-Revolutionary brand name, an established reputation and a quality product. But in everything else it was like any other company emerging from the dysfunctional - if secure - command economy. When regular orders from the state dried up, the factory was forced to switch to products targeted at mass consumers: cheap fortified wine and - oh yes! - bedroom slippers.

It was quite a step down from the days when the company made special deliveries to ailing Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s. To make matters worse, Narzan's equipment was beginning to fall apart. and there was zero investment. But things can change for the better: today Narzan is an advanced company. The U.S.-educated manager Vyacheslav Sinadski was hired to develop a strategy and attract capital from a Western lending institution. The company now outperforms its Soviet peak producing 70 million liters per year and is back on the tables of the nation's elite, including the Kremlin.

The Spectacles Commission

The Spectacles Commission which Petrovich presides is presumably ba-sed on the Государственного объединения музыки, эстрады и цирка (ГОМЕЦ) or the State Union of Music-Hall, Concert, and Circus Enterprises (GOMEC), which was located in the building of the Old Circus, Tsvetnoi bul-var 13, where now the Yuri Nikulin Circus is situated.

The jacket and trousers are there, but inside the jacket there's nothing!

Bulgakov wrote these scenes about the same time Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (1903-1942) were writing The Golden Calf, which has a si-milar scene with an empty suit. The source for both may have been The History of a Town written by Mikhail Yefgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889). This book was published in 1869-1870 and it was a parody of Russian history, in the microcosm of a provincial town, whose very name - Glupov -  is representative of its qualities, because Glupov means Silly-town.

The mayors of Glupov can be distinguished from each other only by the de-gree of their incompetence, but at the same time The History of a Town is an attack on the Russian people for their passivity toward their own fate.

Prokhor Petrovich

Prokhor Petrovich is the chairman of the Spectacles Commission. When Behemoth visits him to "to discuss a little business with him" his patience runs out, and he shouts: "What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!" To which Behemoth smiles and says: "Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!" Petrovich disappears, but his suit stays at the office desk and continues working as if nothing happened. Not for long though. Immediately after the police came into his office, to the number of two men, to investigate the case, he returned to his suit, to the ecstatic joy of Anna Richardovna.

Anna Richardovna

Anna Richardovna is is the personal secretary of Prokhor Petrovich. Her use of the familiar form "Prosha" in addressing him is not appropriate in the work environment.

A cat, black, big as a behemoth

Bulgakov shows how Behemoth got his name here. Hippopotamus in Rus-sian is Бегемот (Begemot).

The affiliate, located in Vagankovsky Lane

There never was an office here connected with entertainment, but Bulgakov would have come to this street to visit the Rumyantsev or Lenin Library. The street takes its name from ваганить (vaganit), a dialect word meaning to clown or play the fool. The czar's jesters (called skomorokhi) used to live here.

Glorious sea, sacred Baikal

This prison song about the Siberian Baikal lake was very popular after the Revolution. It’s title is Славное море, священный Байкал (Slavnoye mo-rye, sviyashchenny Baikal) or Glorious sea, sacred Baikal .

Click here to see how the staff of the Spectacles Commission sings the song

The readers of the English Michael Glenny translation and the readers of the Dutch translation may wonder why this song is mentioned here, since neither Glenny nor Fondse were very accurate at this point. Fondse repla-ced the song by a Dutch childrens’ song, and Glenny substituted Glorious sea, sacred Baikal blithely by  Эй ухнем (Ey Ukhnem) or The Song of the Volga Boatmen, also known as The Volga Burlak's Song. This is another well-known traditional Russian song depicting the suffering of the people in the depth of misery in czarist Russia. It was taken to the number one po-sition in the US-charts in 1941 by Glenn Miller, but it's not the song that Bul-gakov described.

A dose of valerian

Valerian drops are distilled from the plant Valeriana officinalis (Heliotrope), these drops are still used as a mild sedative to calm anxiety and the heart.

Lermontov

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814-1841) was a lyric poet, playwright and novelist of the generation following Pushkin. Lermontov's work shows his aversion to the suppression of the people by the czars. That’s why he was so often in conflict with the authorities; Lermontov was absolutely not well-liked by the court. In 1837 Lermontov wrote the poem Death of a poet as a reaction to Pushkin’s death. Czar Nicolas I didn’t like it and sent him in exile to the Caucasus. Inspired by his experiences, Lermontov wrote his masterpiece, the novel A Hero of Our Time (1840).

In February 1841, he stayed in the health resort Pyatigorsk for a couple of months. There it came to a duel with his fellow-officer Nikolai Solomo-novich Martynov (1815-1875). He deliberately chose the edge of a precipice for the duel, so that if either combatant was wounded, he would fall and his fate would be sealed.. Some say that Martynov had orders from the court to provoke the duel and to kill Lermontov.

Fanov and Kosarchuk, well-known affiliate toadies

I don’t know (yet) if there exists a real prototype for these characters. Фан (Fan) means fan or supporter, and a Косарь (kosar) is a chopper. Kosar-chuk, according to Bulgakov’s description "may not have perfect pitch,  but he has a rather pleasant high tenor".

Foreign money

It may be amazing that here, among the Canadian dollars, British pounds and Dutch guldens, also the Latvian lats and Estonian kroons are men-tioned as “foreign money”. Both Latvia and Estonia were Soviet republics. But between the wars - when Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita - the Baltic states were independent and had their own currencies.



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