Chapter Ten – News from Yalta
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 6:05 pm
MM10 News from Yalta
In this chapter, the theatre director Rimsky (named after the Korsakof composer) is utterly befuddled by Satan’s tricks. The black magician Mr Woland (the guise into which the devil has slipped) had successfully arranged his series of theatrical performances in the main theatre of Moscow, and as his first trick, had spirited his theatre contact Likhodeyev a thousand miles away to Yalta, instantaneously.
The fact that Likhodeyev organised black magic performances, and then is not on hand to discuss this rather strange event, naturally puts Rimsky in a bad mood. Then as the telegrams arrive from Yalta, Rimsky must deal with the impossible. After rejecting all possible explanations, such as planes and trains and so on, Rimsky is left in a difficult state of cognitive dissonance, given his communist commitment to evidence based reason as the only explanation for anything.
Again, this chapter serves as a satirical parable for life under communism. Bulgakov has a deep anger at how the Stalin regime does things which Bulgakov considers morally impossible. The Ukraine deliberate famine could be an example.
He uses Rimsky’s sense of dissonance to illustrate the discomfort produced for traditional morality by the ghastly amoral actions of the Bolsheviks. Our assumptions reject things out of hand, such as black magic, but when such things actually occur, as enabled in the suspension of disbelief in a novel, the confrontation with our sense of reality produces interesting emotional, political and psychological responses.
In this chapter, the theatre director Rimsky (named after the Korsakof composer) is utterly befuddled by Satan’s tricks. The black magician Mr Woland (the guise into which the devil has slipped) had successfully arranged his series of theatrical performances in the main theatre of Moscow, and as his first trick, had spirited his theatre contact Likhodeyev a thousand miles away to Yalta, instantaneously.
The fact that Likhodeyev organised black magic performances, and then is not on hand to discuss this rather strange event, naturally puts Rimsky in a bad mood. Then as the telegrams arrive from Yalta, Rimsky must deal with the impossible. After rejecting all possible explanations, such as planes and trains and so on, Rimsky is left in a difficult state of cognitive dissonance, given his communist commitment to evidence based reason as the only explanation for anything.
Again, this chapter serves as a satirical parable for life under communism. Bulgakov has a deep anger at how the Stalin regime does things which Bulgakov considers morally impossible. The Ukraine deliberate famine could be an example.
He uses Rimsky’s sense of dissonance to illustrate the discomfort produced for traditional morality by the ghastly amoral actions of the Bolsheviks. Our assumptions reject things out of hand, such as black magic, but when such things actually occur, as enabled in the suspension of disbelief in a novel, the confrontation with our sense of reality produces interesting emotional, political and psychological responses.