21. Flight

The title

Margarita's flight over Moscow inspired the rock band Franz Ferdinand to the song Love and Destroy in 2004. It's the b-side of their single Michael.

Click here to read more about the song and to listen to it
Click here to watch a live version of the song

The lane with the kerosene shop

Older residents recall that there was indeed an oil store at number 20 of Sivtsev Vrazhek pereulok, a street parallel to the Arbat.

The dazzlingly bright tubes on the theatre building

The Vakhtangov Theatre on number 26 of the Arbat, was named after Yevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a pupil of Stanislavsky, in 1926. The original 19th century building was destroyed by a bomb in the 40's. It was rebuilt at the same place.

Two primuses

Again  Bulgakov mentions the primus stoves. He did it already in chapter 4, and they will play an important role later in the novel, when Koroviev and Behemoth raise hell in Moscow in chapter 28.

An eight-storeyed, obviously just-constructed building

Dramlit, the House for Dramaturgists and Literators is, according to Bulgakov’s flight description, situated in Bolshoi Nikolopeskovskii pereulok near Arbat.

Click here to read more about the Dramlit house

Becker's drawing-room instrument, not guilty of anything

Jacob Davidovich Becker, a craftsman born in Germany, created his piano building workshop in Saint-Petersburg in 1841. His piano’s enjoyed great fame, and he was the first to apply American and European technologies in the building of piano’s in Russia. In 1903 the company merged with the piano building factory of Ivan Karlovich Schreder (-1889), and in 1917 it was nationalized and renamed the Red October Factory.

In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the company was renamed the Saint Petersburg Piano Factory, but it went bankrupt with a total debt of 13 billion roubles. Lee Magness, the Texan grandson of Ivan Karlovich Schreder, uses all possible means since 1997 to  lay hands on the factory, which he estimates at a value of 650 million dollar.

I'm your dream

The way in which Bulgakov plays with the Russian grammar here is untranslatable. "To dream of someone" in Russian is expressed with the verb сниться (snitsya) but in a particular construction, with the person dreamed of as the subject, and the person dreaming in the dative. “I dreamed of her” in Russian sounds as: “she was dreamed of by me”.

That is why the verb almost always appears in the third person singular, since one rarely talks about oneself being seen in someone else's dream. But that's what Margarita does: “я тебе снюсь”, "I was dreamed by you", she says.

After that she says: “Lie down now (…) I'll go on being your dream”. And the boy answers: “Ну, снись, снись”, which is the imperative form: “Well, be my dream, be my dream”.

My French queen!

With this exclamation Natasha already indicates what will be confirmed by Koroviev in the next chapter – the fact that Margarita is “a great-great-great-granddaughter” of “one of the French queens who lived in the sixteenth century”.

Some naked fat man with a black silk top hat pushed back on his head

I don’t know (yet) who this man could be. But he used to know Claudine, “the ungrieving widow” (see below), as well as the “bright Queen Margot” - the popular name given to Marguerite de Valois (see below). And apparently he used to be a friend of the publisher Hessart in Paris, who lived three centuries after the two abovementioned ladies.

Claudine

Claudine de La Tour-Turenne (1520-1591) was lady-in-waiting of Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the spouse of the French king Henri IV (1553-1610). On October 31; 1535 Claudine married, at the age of 15, to Justus II (1510-1557), seigneur of Tournon and count of Rousillon. At the age of 37 she became a widow.

Bright queen Margot

Queen Margot is Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), queen of France and Navarra, She was the daughter of Henri II (1519-1559) and Catherina de Medici (1519-1589). Three of her brothers have been kings of France: François II (1544-1560), Charles IX (1550-1574) and Henri III (1551-1589).

Her mother first tried to pair her off to various other men, but eventually arrived at her cousin, Henri of Navarra, the later king Henri IV. The marriage took place on August 18, 1572. Henri was a protestant, and according to various sources Catherina de Medici would have tried to take advantage of the gathering of the Huguenots in Paris to organize the bloodbath of the St. Bartholomew's Day in the night between August 24 and 25, 1572.

The marriage of Marguerite and Henri knew much reciprocal cheating, and long periods of separation. In 1599 it was annulled. Marguerite kept her title of queen.

Her memoirs, published more than one hundred years after her death, described innumerable anecdotes about the kings Charles IX, Henri III and Henri IV. Meanwhile she caused many scandals herself. Se died on May 27, 1615.

The bloody wedding of his friend Guessard

The drunken man is indeed quite confused: His feeling for time fails. Hessart was the publisher of Marguerite de Valois's correspondence, but he lived in the 19th century - he published Les Mémoires et lettres de Marguerite de Valois in 1842. The bloody wedding was the notorious St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572.

The Yenisey River

The Yenisey is a 4,129 km long river which is often considered as the separation between eastern and western Siberia.

Transparent naiads

The English translators Pevear and Volokhonski call the water nymphs naiads, and Glenny calls them water-sprites. But naiads are water nymphs of the Greek mythology, while Bulgakov described Russian Русалки (rusalki, singular rusalka). Rusalki were connected to the world of death. They were young women who died before they could get married. In the middle of the night they went to the river bank to dance in the meadows. If they saw handsome men, they would fascinate them with songs and dancing, and then lead the person away to the river floor, to live with them.

Someone goat-legged

Wood ghosts and devils were often portrayed with the lower part of the body of an animal. Andrei Bely (see annotation to chapter 18) describes in his Northern Symphony a goat-legged man at a sabbath.

A black, long-beaked rook

A rook is a big black bird (Trypanocorax frugilegus) resembling a crow.