18. Hapless Visitors

English > The novel > Annotations per chapter > Chapter 18

Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky

Poplavsky is Berlioz’ uncle, who lives in Kiev. Bulgakov himself was from Kiev too. At the beginning of the book; in chapter 3, Berlioz sets out for the exit from Patriarch’s Ponds to call the secret police and runs towards his own decapitation, and Woland calls out : “Would you like me to have a telegram sent at once to your uncle in Kiev?” .

There exists a Russian phrase saying: “В огороде бузина, а в Киеве дядька” - “elderberries in the garden, an uncle in Kiev.” It’s a reply given to someone who just made an  illogical reasoning or conclusion.

Click here to read more about Poplavsky

Have just been run over by tram-car

Bulgakov uses the impersonal form of the verb зарезать (zarezat), which means cutting someone’s throat. The tram-car is in the instrumentalis, which is a bizarre construction, in Russian as in English. As if one could use a tram-car as a knife to cut a throat.

An apartment in Moscow

If a Soviet citizen could obtain an apartment in Moscow it was a great victory. Moscow had goods that could not be found anywhere else. However, to gain a прописка (propiska) - a registration or permit to live there - one had to have been born in the city or marry someone with a permit. Poplavsky's attempts to trade his apartment in Kiev for one in Moscow and his desire to inherit his nephew's housing was a common scenario during the Soviet period.

Click here to read more about the housing policy of the Soviets

The spring flooding of the Dnieper

The Dnieper River flows through Kiev.

The staggeringly beautiful view which opened out from the foot of the monument to Prince Vladimir

The statue of Prince Vladimir I of Kiev stands on a hill overlooking the Dnieper river below. Technically the statue is a monument to the baptism of Russia. Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich the Great (956-1015) was the pagan ruler who, in 988, brought christianity in its Byzantine form to the Kievan Rus'.  Kievan Rus' is considered a predecessor state of three modern East Slavic nations: Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. It stretched out from Kiev to Novgorod. Vladimir hoped for better political and cultural relation with Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire.

The statue was made by Vasili Ivanovich Demut-Malinovsky (1779-1846) and Peter Klodt von Jürgensburg (1805-1867) and was erected in1853.

"Aha!"

Poplavsky's several exclamations of "Aha!" show that he knows how to interpret the news that the chairman and the secretary of the management of Bolshaya Sadovaya no. 302 bis have vanished.

Management member Pyatnazhko

I don’t know (yet) if there exists a real prototype for this character. The first part of his name; пять (pyat), means five, and the verb нажить (nazhit) means earning [money].

As if on purpose, all of them at once ...

In the Russian text the men who vanish are put in the accusative, without any subject or verb. By this playing with the language Bulgakov explains that they are the object of an action - executed by the unmentionable NKVD. Poplavsky, clever man that he is, knows what subject and verb are acting when, a few seconds later, “he found himself alone in the empty management room".

Three hundred drops of tincture of valerian

Again the drops that already appeared in the previous chapter. But 300 drops would be a huge dose, causing a coma or death.

The 412th office

Bulgakov uses again an impossibly high number for a department issuing passports.

Passports

The internal passport was abolished after the revolution and reinstated by Stalin on October 27, 1932, in the period of the great famine. The rural population did not get one, which was meant to avoid that everybody left the kolchozes. Without a passport it was impossible to move to another city. Peasants had to wait until the 60’s before they could have a passport.

Everything was confusion in the Oblonskys' home

Bulgakov quotes the first line of the novel Anna Karenina (1873-1876) written by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910).

An old-fashioned tussore silk suit

Bulgakov describes an elderly man в чесунчовом старинном костюме - "in an old-fashioned tussore silk suit". Чесуча is tussore silk. It’s a brownish kind of wild silk, produced by the caterpillar of the tussah butterfly, which is found in China.

The Dutch translators don’t talk about tussore silk, they mention shantung silk. Shangtung is the name given to a rough silk tissue produced in the province of Shan-tung or Shandong - 山东  in Chinese. Shantung is considered as the province where pottery-making, porcelain and silk originated. Are the Dutch translators mistaken than? Well, not quite. Tissues made from tussore silk are honan and - yes - shantung.

Leave me alone, for Christ's sake...

In the Russian text we can read "Оставь, Христа ради..." or “Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake…”. It’s the only mention of Christ in the novel.

Andrei Fokich Sokov

Sokov is the barman at  the Variety Theatre. It’s an appropriate name for a barman, because the Russian word сок (sok) means juice.

Click here to read more about Andrei Sokov

A funereal cloak lined with fiery cloth and a long sword with a gleaming gold hilt

These are costumes and props appropriate to Mephistopheles in the opera Faust  by Charles Gounod (1818-1895).

Baron Meigel

The real prototype for Baron Meigel's character is, without any doubt, Baron Boris Sergeevich Shteiger (1892-1937). In the '20's and '30's he worked in Moscow at the Наркомпрос (Narkompros), the People's Commissariat for Enlightening, Department Visual Arts, and simultaneously as an agent of the NKVD. In 1937 he was arrested and shot. Shteiger is mentioned several times in the diary of Elena Sergeevna. He was often found at US Embassy functions and reported on foreigners connected with the theatre, and on Soviet citizens having contact with the embassy.

Meigel reappears in chapter 23, at the great ball of Satan.

Click here to read more about baron Meigel

Next page Annotations chapter 18



Share this page |