The Master and Margarita, page 49
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cisco: A northern variety of whitefish caught in Lake Baikal.
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Barguzin: A local personification of the north-east wind.
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Shilka and Nerchinsk: Towns on the Shilka River east of Baikal, known as places of exile.
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Lermontov studies: Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), lyric poet and novelist of the generation following Pushkin.
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Maximilian Andreevich did not like Kiev: Bulgakov, however, loved Kiev, his birthplace, as the descriptions of the city and of Vladimir’s Hill here and in The White Guard make clear. Prince Vladimir (or St Vladimir), grand prince of Kievan Rus, gave firm foundations to the first Russian state and in 988 converted his people to Christianity.
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Passport!: The internal passport, a feature of Russian life in tsarist times, was abolished after the revolution, but reinstated by Stalin in 1932. It was the only accepted means of identification and had to be carried at all times. The precinct number that the cat gives later (412th) is absurdly high, even for a big city.
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Everything was confusion... : The second sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, proverbial in Russia.
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a church panikhida: A special service of the Orthodox Church for commemoration of the dead.
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leech bureau: Leeches have been used medically since ancient times as a means of blood-letting, thought to lower blood pressure and cure various ailments. A rather primitive treatment in this context.
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Margarita: The name Bulgakov gives to his heroine recalls that of Gretchen (diminutive of Margarete), the young girl ruined by Faust in Goethe’s drama. It may also recall Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), wife of French king Henri IV, known as ‘la reine Margot’ (several times in later chapters Margarita will be called Margot and even Queen Margot).
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the dread Antonia Tower: A fortress in ancient Jerusalem which housed the Roman garrison in the city and where the Roman procurator normally stayed on official visits. It was named by Herod the Great in honour of the Roman general and triumvir Mark Antony (83-30 BC), who ruled the eastern third of the empire.
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Hasmonaean Palace: Palace of the Hasmonaean or Maccabean dynasty, rulers of Judea in the second century BC, who resisted the Seleucid kings Antiochus IV and Demetrius Soter.
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the Manège: Originally a riding academy built after the war with Napoleon, the building was later used as a quondam concert hall. Abandoned after the revolution, it served in Bulgakov’s time as a garage and warehouse for the Kremlin, but has now been restored as a permanent art-exhibition space.
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a candelabrum ... seven golden claws: Woland’s two candelabra are satanic parodies of the menorah made by the Jews at God’s command during their wandering in the wilderness (Exodus 25:31-9, 37:17-24). A seven-branched candelabrum also stands on the altar of every Christian church.
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a beetle artfully carved: The Egyptians saw the scarabaeus beetle as a symbol of immortality because it survived the annual flooding of the Nile. The ritual use of carved stone scarabs spread to Palestine, Greece and Italy in ancient times.
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Hans: Like Jack, Jean, or Ivan in the folk-tales of their countries, the Hans of German tales is generally the third son of the family and considered a fool (though he usually winds up with the treasure and the princess for his bride).
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Sextus Empiricur, Martianus Capella: Sextus Empiricus (second-third century AD), Greek philosopher, astronomer and physician, was a representative of the most impartial scepticism. Martianus Capella, a Latin author of the fifth century AD, wrote an encyclopedia in novel form entitled The Marriage of Mercury and Philology.
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this pain in my knee ... Mount Brocken: Satan’s lameness is more commonly ascribed to his fall from heaven. Mount Brocken, highest of the Harz Mountains in Germany, is a legendary gathering place of witches and devils, and the site of the Walpurgisnacht (as in Goethe’s Faust) on the eve of the First of May.
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Abaddon: Hebrew for ‘destruction’. In the Old Testament it is another name for Sheol, the place where the dead abide (Job 26:6, 28:22; Psalms 88:11). In the New Testament, it is the name of the ‘angel of the bottomless pit’ (Revelation 9:11).
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waltz king: Unofficial title of the Viennese composer Johann Strauss (1825- 99)-
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Vieuxtemps: Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-81), Belgian virtuoso violinist, made his début in Paris at the age of ten. He travelled the world giving concerts, taught in the conservatory of Brussels and for some time also in the conservatory of St Petersburg, where he was first violinist of the imperial court.
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Monsieur Jacques: Identified by L. Yanovskaya as Jacques Coeur (c. 1395- 1456), a rich French merchant who became superintendent of finances under Charles VII. He did make a false start in life in association with a counterfeiter before embarking on his legitimate successes, and was indeed suspected of poisoning the king’s mistress, Agnes Sorel, but was quickly cleared. He was neither a traitor to his country nor an alchemist.
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Earl Robert: Identified by L. Yanovskaya as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (?1532-88), a favourite of Elizabeth I of England, whose wife, Amy Rosbarts, did die in suspicious circumstances, though not by poisoning but by falling downstairs.
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Madame Tofana: La Tofana, a woman of Palermo, was arrested as a poisoner and strangled in prison in 1709. The poison named after her, aqua tofana, had in fact been known since the fifteenth century and is held responsible for the deaths of some 600 persons, including the popes Pius III and Clement XIV and the Duke of Anjou.
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a Spanish boot: A wooden torture device.
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Frieda: Her story is reminiscent of that of Gretchen in Faust. B. V. Sokolov finds Bulgakov’s source in The Sexual Question, by Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel, who tells a similar story of a certain Frieda Keller.
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The marquise: Made-Madeleine d‘Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (1630—76), a notorious poisoner, was decapitated and burned in Paris.
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Madame Minkin: Nastasya Fyodorovna Minkin, mistress of Count Arakcheev (1769-1834), military adviser to the emperor Alexander I. A notoriously cruel and depraved woman, she was murdered by her household serfs in 1825.
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the emperor Rudolf Rudolf II Hapsburg (1552-1612), German emperor, son of Maximilian II, lived in Prague, took great interest in astronomy and alchemy, and was the protector of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.
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A Moscow dressmaker: The heroine of Bulgakov’s own play, Zoyka’s Apartment, which describes a brothel disguised as a dressmaker’s shop.
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Caligula: Gaius Caesar (AD 12-41), nicknamed Caligula (’Little Boot‘), was the son of Germanicus and succeeded Tiberius as emperor. Half mad, he subjected Rome to many tyrannical outrages and was eventually assassinated.
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Messalina: (AD 15-48), third wife of the emperor Claudius, was famous for her debauchery.
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Maliuta Skuratov: Nickname of the Russian nobleman Grigory Lukyanovich Skuratov-Belsky, the right-hand man of Ivan the Terrible, who made him head of the oprichnina, a special force opposed to the nobility, which terrorized Russia, burning, pillaging and murdering many people. He is said to have smothered St Philip, metropolitan of Moscow, with his own hands.
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one more ... no, two!: B. V. Sokolov identifies these two unnamed new ones as former People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Genrikh G. Yagoda (1891- 1938) and his secretary, P. P. Bulanov. Yagoda, a ruthless secret-police official who fabricated the ’show trial’ of the ‘right-wing Trotskyist centre’, was later arrested himself and condemned to be shot, along with his secretary, Bukharin, Rykov and others, in Stalin’s third great ‘show trial’ of 1938.
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the Kamarinsky: A popular Russian dance-song with ribald words.
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A salamander-conjurer: The salamander enjoyed the reputation during the Middle Ages and Renaissance of being able to go through fire without getting burned.
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the same dirty, patched shirt: According to one of Bulgakov’s sources, M. N. Orlov’s History of Man’s Relations with the Devil (St Petersburg, 1904), Satan always wears a dirty shirt while performing a black mass.
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it will be given to each according to his faith: A common misapplication of Christ’s words, ’According to your faith be it done to you’ (Matt. 9:29).
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wandered in the wilderness for nineteen days: A comic distortion of well-known examples: the period of wandering is usually a round figure - forty days or forty years - and the usual sustenance is manna or locusts and wild honey (see Numbers 33:38, Amos 5:25, Matt. 3:1-4).
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manuscripts don’t burn: This phrase became proverbial among Russian intellectuals after the publication of The Master and Margarita, an event which in itself seemed to bear out the truth of Woland’s words.
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Aloisy Mogarych: An absurd combination of the Latinate Aloisius with the slangy ‘Mogarych’, the word for the round of drinks that concludes a deal, which happens to have the form of a Russian patronymic.
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bruderschaft: A special pledge of brotherhood drunk with interlaced right arms, after which the friends address each other with the familiar form ty.
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Falerno: A rich and strong red wine, named for the ager falernur in the Roman Campagnia where it was produced in ancient times (not to be confused with the white Falerno now produced around Naples).
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Caecuba: Also a strong red wine, product of the ager caecubus in southern Latium.
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the feast of the twelve gods: The twelve senior gods of the Roman pantheon: Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Venus, Mars, Vesta, Mercury and Minerva.
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lares: A word of Etruscan or Sabine origin, referring to the nameless protective deities of the house and hearth in Roman religion.
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messiah: From the Hebrew mashiah, meaning ‘the anointed one’, referring to the redeemer and deliverer of Israel to be born of the royal house of David, prophesied by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah and others, and awaited by the Jewish nation. Christians believe that this prophecy was fulfilled in Christ (christos being Greek for ‘the annointed one’).
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were they given the drink before being hung on the posts?: Thought by some commentators to be a legal mercy granted to the condemned to lessen the suffering of crucifixion, as Pilate means it here, though in the Gospels it has more the appearance of a final mockery. Jesus also refuses to drink it (see Matt. 27:34, Mark 15:23).
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among human vices he considered cowardice one of the first: This saying, not found in the Gospels, is of great thematic importance for the novel. Bulgakov himself, according to one of his friends, regarded cowardice as the worst of all vices, ‘because all the rest come from it’ (quoted in a memoir in Vospominaniya o Mikhaile Bulgakove, Moscow, 1988, pp. 389-90). Interestingly, all references to this ’worst of vices’ were removed from the original magazine publication of the novel.
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thirty tetradrachmas: The ‘thirty pieces of silver’ mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew (26:15) as Judas’s reward from the high priest for betraying Jesus. A tetradrachma was a Greek silver coin worth four drachmas and was equivalent to one Jewish shekel.
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Now we shall always be together: Yeshua’s words are fulfilled in the Nicene creed: ’... one Lord Jesus Christ ... who was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate ...‘ — words repeated countless times a day for nearly two thousand years in every liturgy or mass. Later in the novel, Pilate will say that nothing in the world is more hateful to him than ’is immortality and his unheard-of fame‘.
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the son of an astrologer-king ... Pila: Details found in the poem Pilate by the twelfth-century Flemish poet Petrus Pictor (noted by Marianne Gourg in her commentary to the French translation of the novel, R. Laffont, Paris, 1995). The name of Pila thus becomes the source of the procurator’s second name.
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En-Sarid: Arabic for Nazareth.
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Valerius Gratus: According to Flavius Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews (Book 18, Chapter 2), Valerius Gratus was procurator of Judea starting from sometime around AD 15, and was thus Pilate’s immediate predecessor.
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might he not have killed himself?: Here Pilate prompts Aphranius with what is in fact the Gospel account of Judas’s death (Matt. 27:5).
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baccuroth: Aramaic for ’fresh figs‘.
