Chapter 27: The Last of Flat No. 50
Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2018 11:54 pm
Always the master, Bulgakov uses this chapter for a hilarious recapitulation of the book, from the perspective of the State authorities who are trying to work out how to respond to blatantly impossible evidence about Satan’s accursed black magic performance in Moscow. Bulgakov is only too aware of the culture and methods of Soviet officialdom. They haul in all the involved staff from the Variety Theatre and key witnesses for interrogation, rapidly finding that credible and incredible witnesses alike tell a consistent story that is incredible. These events have reduced sane grown men to beg to be locked up.
Even the working hypothesis of mass hypnosis struggles to explain how Likhodeyev had travelled a thousand miles from Moscow to Yalta in an hour. And then when the police raid Woland’s flat for the arrest, the accursed place is always empty, despite neighbours seeing the accursed black cat sunning itself on the window sill, hearing the familiar nasal whine answering the phone, and the tinkling of someone playing the piano.
The amusing embedded irony obviously underlying this ridiculous farce is that Bulgakov sees the Bolshevik coup of 1917 as leading rational people to an equal state of perplexed dumbfoundedment as the police who are tasked to catch the devil. The Russian middle and upper classes were caught in a bewildered state of disbelief as the Germans sent Lenin in the sealed train to the Finland Station, unleashing a botulistic political plague of hatred through the communist revolution that no one could have imagined was possible.
The failure of the Whites to win the Civil War dealt a further blow to assumptions about the limits of the possible, and then the mad descent into collectivisation and terror capped this sad set of stories of the triumph of the impossible. Bulgakov did not live to see the Motherland emerge in glorious victory from the Great Patriotic War, against seemingly impossible odds, but clearly Hitler also underestimated what the communists were capable of in popular mobilisation in the name of an idea.
The serious political message that unthinkable events can happen is regaining its political relevance as Lenin emerges as a folk hero, if not for Sanders and Corbyn then for their extreme acolytes whose grasp of basic economics is so empty.
The chapter concludes in high drama, a gunfight of Mausers (police) versus Browning (cat) at close range, leading to an infernal conflagration as the former flat of the late lamented decapitated Berlioz is doused with paraffin by Behemoth the wicked cat and set alight. Strangely, even when hit with mortal bullet wounds the immortal immoral cat is able to drink paraffin as a bullet antidote, and all his damn fool shots seem to miss the attacking police.
Even the working hypothesis of mass hypnosis struggles to explain how Likhodeyev had travelled a thousand miles from Moscow to Yalta in an hour. And then when the police raid Woland’s flat for the arrest, the accursed place is always empty, despite neighbours seeing the accursed black cat sunning itself on the window sill, hearing the familiar nasal whine answering the phone, and the tinkling of someone playing the piano.
The amusing embedded irony obviously underlying this ridiculous farce is that Bulgakov sees the Bolshevik coup of 1917 as leading rational people to an equal state of perplexed dumbfoundedment as the police who are tasked to catch the devil. The Russian middle and upper classes were caught in a bewildered state of disbelief as the Germans sent Lenin in the sealed train to the Finland Station, unleashing a botulistic political plague of hatred through the communist revolution that no one could have imagined was possible.
The failure of the Whites to win the Civil War dealt a further blow to assumptions about the limits of the possible, and then the mad descent into collectivisation and terror capped this sad set of stories of the triumph of the impossible. Bulgakov did not live to see the Motherland emerge in glorious victory from the Great Patriotic War, against seemingly impossible odds, but clearly Hitler also underestimated what the communists were capable of in popular mobilisation in the name of an idea.
The serious political message that unthinkable events can happen is regaining its political relevance as Lenin emerges as a folk hero, if not for Sanders and Corbyn then for their extreme acolytes whose grasp of basic economics is so empty.
The chapter concludes in high drama, a gunfight of Mausers (police) versus Browning (cat) at close range, leading to an infernal conflagration as the former flat of the late lamented decapitated Berlioz is doused with paraffin by Behemoth the wicked cat and set alight. Strangely, even when hit with mortal bullet wounds the immortal immoral cat is able to drink paraffin as a bullet antidote, and all his damn fool shots seem to miss the attacking police.