[In the following essay, Curtis provides a biographical account of Bulgakov's involvement with American diplomats in Russia and argues that the author satirized his experience in The Master and Margarita.]

In the mid-1930s the aristocratic game of polo was introduced to Stalin's Red Army. The man responsible for this improbable feat was Charles Thayer, a young diplomat at the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow. For many years after the 1917 Revolution no formal diplomatic ties existed between the USSR and the United States. In 1932, however, Franklin Roosevelt made it a plank of his presidential campaign that diplomatic relations should be restored, not least because of the need to coordinate resistance to the Nazi threat in Germany and to the apparently imperialist aspirations of Japan. Dialogue was officially resumed at the end of 1933, and arrangements were made to open an American Embassy in Moscow. A spectacular building on Spaso-Peskovskaia Square, known by the Americans as Spaso House, was allocated to the ambassador for his official residence. Everyone admired its imposing staircase and the domed ballroom with its white marble pillars and glittering chandeliers.

Charles Thayer, bored with life in the U.S. Army Academy, had already made his way to Russia to start learning Russian, at the same time hoping to obtain a job at the new embassy.¹ When William Bullitt, who was to be the first ambassador, arrived in Moscow in December 1933 to present his letters of credence, Thayer talked his way into Bullitt's hotel bedroom to plead his case. When he arrived, a rather bald and plump figure, dressed, to Thayer's surprise, in a kimono, invited him in and handed him the script of a play he was to attend that evening at the Moscow Art Theater, requesting that Thayer translate it. An appalled Thayer, whose knowledge of Russian did not at that point extend much beyond capital letters, recognized the play's title and realized it was Mikhail Bulgakov's Days of the Turbins. With great presence of mind, he offered to summarize the plot as he pretended to read, which he was able to do because he had already seen the play several times on stage. Bullitt gave him a job, for which Thayer may therefore in a sense be said to have Bulgakov to thank.

One of the tales Thayer tells of this period in his memoirs is of a dreary dinner attended by Marshal Voroshilov and General Budyonny, at which Thayer served as interpreter. Wearying of the usual social inanities between the ambassador and his guests, Thayer began to engage in a conversation of his own, asking the two military leaders why no polo was played in Russia. After a while, he turned to a startled Ambassador Bullitt to inform him that the Russians were delighted that he and Bullitt had apparently offered to teach them the game. So it was that Charles Thayer, with Ambassador Bullitt as referee, took part in regular matches near the women's nude bathing beach on the Moscow River, against a crack team from the Red Army mounted on a string of sixty-four perfect polo ponies conjured from nothing in a matter of weeks. Bullitt later reported to President Roosevelt that “the polo has brought not only myself but our military men into the closest relationship with the Red Army leaders and has proved most useful.”² Only the worsening international situation later in the decade brought these encounters to an end, and Thayer remained the Red Army's one and only Senior Polo Instructor.

This was typical of the kind of scrapes Thayer got into. In 1934 he organized a Christmas party for the embassy, with performing seals who went berserk in the ballroom after their trainer drank too much and passed out. Despite that fiasco, Bullitt commissioned Thayer to organize another party in April 1935—something really stunning designed to impress the Soviet establishment. Egged on by the counselor's wife, Irena Wiley, Thayer once again went for animals: a miniature farmyard with baby goats, roosters, and a baby bear, as well as golden pheasants, parakeets, and a hundred zebra finches in a gilded net (that escaped at the end of the party, much to Ambassador Bullitt's annoyance). They had chicory carpeting the tables, birch trees bursting into leaf after being kept in the embassy's bathrooms for a week or so, tulips flown in from Finland, and pictures of roses and camellias projected, on the advice of a director of the Kamerny Theater, onto the ballroom walls. There was a Czech jazz band, a Gypsy orchestra, and Georgian sword dances. Some five hundred guests were present, including Litvinov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Bukharin, Yegorov, Tukhachevsky, and Radek—all the Soviet elite except Stalin himself. It was deemed the most sensational party in Moscow since the Revolution.

Among the Russian guests at this occasion were Mikhail Bulgakov and his wife Elena Sergeevna. Bulgakov's play The Days of the Turbins had served to effect an introduction not only between Charles Thayer and Ambassador Bullitt but also, as it turned out, between the ambassador and its author. In December 1933 Elena Sergeevna records in her diary a newspaper cutting reporting Bullitt's attendance at The Days of the Turbins and his comments—presumably on the strength of Thayer's summary—“Splendid play, splendid performance.”³ In March 1934 Bullitt requested Bulgakov to send him a copy of the text; in August of the same year the Bulgakovs were introduced to Thayer at a reception; and in September 1934 they made the acquaintance of Bullitt himself at a performance of the play, which Bullitt said he had now seen five times.

By 1935 Bulgakov was entering a period of relative ease despite the political tensions of the day—the murder of Kirov in December 1934 had recently signaled the beginning of an extreme phase of Stalin's Terror. But several of Bulgakov's plays were in production or being staged, which seemed a more hopeful sign after the catastrophic banning of four of his plays in 1929. Not only had he at long last married his great love, Elena Sergeevna, but he had also been allocated a new apartment; he had begun to overcome the psychological condition which, for a period of six months in 1934, had made it impossible for him to leave the house alone; and now here was the U.S. ambassador himself acclaiming his work and drawing the Bulgakovs into the glittering social circles of embassy life. During this period the Bulgakovs would be driven to and from the embassy in American cars to attend receptions, meals, cocktail parties, and film screenings, and be introduced to the French, Turkish, and Romanian ambassadors and their families. In October 1934 Bulgakov spent an agreeable day at Thayer's dacha, discussing the theater. The Americans in turn accepted invitations to the Bulgakovs' apartment and would arrive bearing flowers and whiskey, to eat meals of caviar, salmon, and fried mushrooms. Always present on these occasions, of course, were Soviet “interpreters” who were patiently writing reports on every word spoken; but Bulgakov would nevertheless take advantage of the occasions to talk provocatively in front of these foreigners about his plans to travel abroad (a dream that was never to be realized). George Kennan, a future ambassador himself, came one day in 1936 to discuss a biography of Chekhov that he was planning to write, while Chip Bohlen—like Kennan, a third secretary—declared his intention of translating Bulgakov's play Zoika's Apartment into English.

The invitation to the midnight ball in April 1935 caused quite a stir in the Bulgakov household, and Elena Sergeevna has left an ecstatic account of the event in her diary:

I was dressed by the seamstress and Tamara Tomasovna. My evening dress was a rippling dark blue with pale pink flowers; it came out very well. Misha was in a very smart dark suit.

At 11:30 we set off … Never in my life have I seen such a ball. The ambassador stood at the top of the stairs to greet his guests. … Bohlen and another American, who turned out to be the military attache, … came down the stairs to meet us and received us very cordially.

There were people dancing in a ballroom with columns, floodlights shining down from the gallery, and behind a net that separated the orchestra from the dancers there were live pheasants and other birds. … There were masses of tulips and roses. Of course there was an exceptional abundance of food and champagne. … And we left at 5:30 in one of the embassy cars, having first invited some of the Americans from the embassy to call on us.⁴

Six days after the ball, Thayer, Irena Wiley, and Bohlen spent an evening with the Bulgakovs, and no doubt the preparations for the ball and the event itself formed a hilarious topic of conversation. Throughout the rest of 1935 and well into 1936 these social contacts continued, confirming Bulgakov's status as a member of the cultural elite. However, the frail hopes Bulgakov had in 1935 that his works would all finally get staged were soon dashed. After two devastating attacks on Shostakovich in the press early in 1936, Bullitt reported to Roosevelt that “Stalin's latest imitation of the Roi Soleil is to dictate in the field of music and drama.”⁵ On March 9, 1936, a leader in Pravda meted out the same treatment to Bulgakov with a denunciation of his newly opened play about Molière, The Cabal of Hypocrites. Soon Bulgakov's plays were all banned or canceled again, as they had been in 1929, and the years between 1936 and his death in 1940 were darkened by a pervasive sense of defeat. Contacts between the Bulgakovs and the Americans, for all the latter's sympathy, became more intermittent, especially after Bullitt left Moscow at the end of 1936.

It is obvious from the accounts of the April 1935 ball left by Thayer in his memoirs and Elena Sergeevna in her diary that the occasion proved a fertile stimulus to Bulgakov's portrayal of Satan's Ball in The Master and Margarita.⁶ In earlier versions of the novel the occasion had been envisaged not as a ball but as a witches' sabbath, with scandalous erotic scenes (Chudakova describes as “Rabelaisian” a moment in the 1933 third redaction when a vase in the form of a golden phallus grows erect, to Margarita's laughter, at the touch of her hand).⁷ In the later, rather more decorous version of the ball, Margarita arrives at the apartment and is astounded by the magnificence of the staircase and the vastness of the enormous colonnaded ballroom. Satan's retinue are dressed in tails, and even the cat Behemoth has donned a white tie, hung mother-of-pearl binoculars around his neck, and gilded his whiskers. During the ball itself, an explosion of light and sound, Margarita is impressed by the vegetation—here a tropical forest with lianas rather than chicory and birch trees—as well as the wall of tulips, the ballroom festooned with roses and camillias, and the loud jazz band—all details recalling the embassy party. Earlier, walking through the darkness, Margarita had been alarmed by something brushing against her head, which turns out to be one of the parrots that Behemoth, who is organizing the ball, has laid on. Woland grumbles about them just as Bullitt did about Thayer's escaped zebra finches. Perhaps there is indeed, at least for the duration of this episode, something of the buccaneer Charles Thayer in the cat Behemoth?

During the ball episode in the novel some striking remarks are made about the guests. Koroviev explains to Margarita, “We shall see people who commanded enormous authority in their time. But when you reflect on how infinitesimal their powers were in comparison to the powers of the one in whose retinue I have the honor to serve [Woland, the devil], then in my opinion they come to seem laughable, even pathetic.”⁸ Margarita endures the torment of receiving Woland's guests, until “she felt as little interest in the Emperor Caligula and Messalina as she did in any of the rest of the kings, dukes, knights, suicides, poisoners, gallows-birds, procuresses, gaolers, card-sharpers, hangmen, informers, traitors, madmen, detectives, and seducers.” Korov'iev is notably “unable” to name the very last two guests to arrive, evidently the recently dead. As Piper and Lamperini have shown, their story, which involves one of them obliging the other to spray the walls of his successor's office with poison, is an anecdote that would have been immediately recognizable to a contemporary audience. The same charge was made against Yagoda, one of the perpetrators of Stalin's Terror, when he was accused in 1938 of getting his subordinate to spray with poison the office of his successor, Yezhov.⁹

In Bulgakov's re-creation of the ball, the final guest is the unfortunate Baron Maigel, an official “guide for foreign visitors,” notorious as an eavesdropper and a spy whose death by shooting forms part of the ceremony conducted by Woland at the culmination of the ball. His character too can easily find a prototype in a man well known to Charles Thayer: a certain Baron Steiger who was well connected in the Soviet establishment. Every week Thayer used to deliver to him a tin of Edgeworth pipe tobacco to be passed on to Stalin himself. Thayer recalls having a conversation with Steiger shortly before he was arrested and shot in December 1937.¹⁰ That he would have been associated in the Bulgakovs' minds with the American ball is indicated by Elena Sergeevna's description of their drive home afterward in an embassy car:

We were joined in the car by a man we hadn't met, but who is known throughout Moscow and who is always to be found where foreigners are—I think he's called Steiger. He sat with the driver and we sat in the back.¹¹

Several conclusions begin to emerge here. First, Bulgakov's experience of being taken up by the Americans and lionized during a span of barely eighteen months between 1934 and 1936 represented an astonishing contrast with the fears, oppression, and restrictions of his everyday life in Moscow. The ball at the U.S. Embassy figured as the peak of a golden, almost unreal phase in Bulgakov's increasingly grim life. The Americans arrived, seemingly out of the blue, in 1933; they offered him worldwide recognition, and they also brought with them a fantastical degree of glamour and luxury, a whiff of the life of the elite in pre-Soviet Russia, perhaps. They were free agents, able to travel wherever and whenever they wished; their powers must have seemed miraculous in the prison, as Bulgakov perceived it, of the USSR. As the hosts at the U.S. Embassy ball in 1935 they provide recognizable prototypes for the characters of The Master and Margarita, for if Charles Thayer has certain crazy and endearing features reminiscent of Behemoth, then Ambassador William Bullitt equally contributes to certain aspects of Woland.

Bulgakov could hardly fail to be struck by the personality of Bullitt, who was no less colorful a figure than Thayer. A diplomat who had for many years received treatment from Freud and who went on to write a biography of Woodrow Wilson in coauthorship with Freud, Bullitt had good contacts with Lenin in his day. He later married Louise Bryant, widow of John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World. Clearly, Bullitt was someone who must have communicated to his Russian friends his intense and possibly sympathetic interest in the consequences of the 1917 Revolution, some of whose notable protagonists he had known personally. He was clearly dismayed with much of what he found. At a time of constant arrests—Mandel'stam was arrested from the apartment block where Bulgakov lived in May 1934—Bullitt was helpless to intervene:

The terror, always present, has risen to such a pitch that the least of the Muscovites, as well as the greatest, is in fear. Almost no one dares have any contact with foreigners and this is not unbased fear, but a proper sense of reality. … I can, of course, do nothing to save anyone. … The Russians still dare to come to my house for large entertainments, when there can be no possibility of private conversation.¹²

This report Bullitt sent to Roosevelt, written within a week of the embassy ball, emphasizes just how great a risk Bulgakov was taking in mixing with the Americans. But with his belief in the enduring significance of art (“Manuscripts don't burn,” insists Woland [703]), Bulgakov cherished this recognition afforded him by the representative of a Western nation at a time when he could expect nothing but vilification from his fellow countrymen. Just before the Molière play was canceled, Bullitt, like their other embassy friends, attended a performance: “Bullitt spoke extremely favorably about the play and about Mikhail Afanas'evich in general, and called him a master,” records Elena Sergeevna proudly.¹³

The Americans emerge, then, as partial prototypes for the hosts at Woland's ball. And what of the guests? The procession of murderers and pimps received by Margarita at the top of the stairs is, by implication, to be equated with the leading members of the government whom Thayer listed in his memoirs; people who, as he observes, went on over the next few years to eliminate one another as Stalin's Terror turned into a deadly struggle for survival among rivals in the elite.

However, we must beware of extending the interpretation of Woland and Behemoth as Bullitt and Thayer to the rest of The Master and Margarita. It would be a mistake to impose an overly allegorical and specifically political interpretation on a novel that achieves its impact largely through its mercurial and shifting generic identity. Indeed, no single generic categorization has ever seemed adequate to reflect the intricacy of the purposes of The Master and Margarita. The text contains a solemn and realistic “novel within a novel” that enters into dialogue with the Gospels themselves. When this is set alongside the blend of broad comedy and poignant romance in the Moscow chapters, a unifying allegorical interpretation becomes unthinkable.

But if it is not allegorical, the novel is certainly satirical in the sense that it is a comic work informed by a moral purpose that has topical relevance. The first of the various levels on which the novel's satire functions is that of universal satire, the mockery of perennial human failings as they manifest themselves in the Moscow of the 1920s and 1930s. The showing up of human weaknesses seems to be the primary purpose of Woland and his retinue in their visit to Moscow: they provoke and then punish the vices of vanity, greed, hypocrisy, and lying which characterize the Muscovites as they do humankind in general. “Altogether, they remind me of the people here before. … It's just that they've been warped by the housing crisis,” concludes Woland.

A second level of satire is directed at certain institutions. Woland and his retinue wreak particular havoc among the administrators of the theatrical world and the membership of Massolit, the fictional writers' organization whose headquarters at Griboedov House are eventually destroyed by fire. Clearly Bulgakov had particular reasons for selecting these targets for Woland's wrath. Having savaged the overbearing, bureaucratic, and exploitative attitudes he encountered while working in the Moscow Art Theater in his play The Crimson Island and his unfinished Theatrical Novel, in The Master and Margarita he aims his pen squarely at the groups that exercised control over literature—the Russian Association for Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which hounded his friend Eugene Zamiatin out of the country, and its successor, The Writers' Union, which imposed monolithic controls after 1932-34 through its theory of socialist realism. Nothing could have been more abhorrent to Bulgakov than the rule of the philistines in literature: “Surely you don't have to ask Dostoevsky for his membership card in order to be sure that he's a writer?” asks Koroviev disingenuously when challenged at the entrance to Griboedov House, that temple of material, as opposed to aesthetic, values. It is fitting that the culmination of Woland's visit to Moscow should be the moment at the ball when he awards Berlioz his just desserts and consigns him to oblivion for his “friendly” but unforgivable attempt to censor Bezdomny's poem because it is insufficiently atheistic.

In addition to the universal and the institutional, The Master and Margarita offers varying levels of political satire. Here we must disagree with Andrew Barratt's assertion that “very little of the satire has a specifically ‘Stalinist’ target.”¹⁴ The text brims over with allusions to the police state—some discreet, others less so. References to the pervasive suspicion of foreigners, Bezdomny's unthinking retort that Immanuel Kant should be dispatched to Solovki (a notorious labor camp in the White Sea), the “inexplicable” disappearances of people from Berlioz's and Likhodeyev's apartment, the latter's anxiety about his “unnecessary” conversation and article, many actual arrests, and Bosoy's “show trial” dream all reveal that Moscow is obsessed with the threat of repressions. “How jumpy people are nowadays!” exclaims Woland. The dominating presence of the ogpu is indicated largely through euphemism: “Take the telegrams personally. Let them sort it out,” Rimsky tells Varenukha (525). Varenukha needs no further instructions about where to go, and when he does not return, Rimsky's only question is, “What on earth for?” (i.e., “Why have they arrested him?”) (534). The ogpu headquarters are continually characterized with elliptical phrases such as “there,” or “another place,” as when Bosoy is summoned to the headquarters before being transferred to the asylum. When Azazello approaches Margarita in the Kremlin Gardens she immediately assumes she is being arrested, and he complains, “What is this—you only have to open your mouth for people automatically to think you're arresting them!” (641). At the entrance to Griboedov House, visitors' names are all “for some unknown reason” recorded (769). Indeed, this atmosphere of a police state pervades even the “neutral” omniscient narrative of the Moscow chapters, some of which appears to be couched mockingly in the form of a police report: “It is impossible to say … and nobody knows either … we are also unable to say, although we do know that …” (762). In a slippage characteristic of the novel's underlying and unifying poetics, such phrases even creep into the Yershalaim chapters: “No one knows … although we do know …” (733). Here it reinforces our sense of the authoritarian Roman regime, where figures such as Afranius constantly report on the thoughts and action of the citizens of Yershalaim. In Moscow the “police report” is, we may presume, compiled by the members of “a certain Moscow organization overlooking a large square” (747)—an unmistakable reference to the Lubyanka.

The Master's fate is alluded to in equally circumspect terms. His persecution at the hands of the critics is capped by Aloisy Mogarych's self-interested denunciation of him for harboring illegal literature. The very indirectness with which this dramatic event is told (we learn of a tapping at the window in October, of the Master's being released in January with no buttons on his coat, and of Margarita's hypothesis that he may have been sent into internal exile) evokes once again the fearfulness people felt about even alluding to these things out loud. When, in the asylum, the Master tells Ivan his story, this all-pervasive fear is underscored by the fact that a noise in the corridor causes him to describe his experiences with the ogpu in a whisper as inaudible, it seems, to the narrator as it is to the reader. We are left to infer the truth about his treatment from Woland's remarks (“They did a good job on him” [701]), that of the Master himself (“They have broken me,” [708]), and that of Margarita (“They have laid waste to your soul … Just look at your eyes! They are empty, and look at your shoulders, bowed under their burden … They have simply crippled you.” [782]). Bulgakov, although he himself escaped actual arrest, was aware that it was a threat that constantly hung over him. In his novel, however, he postulates a hopeful scenario, where the tragedy of persecution and parting can be healed by the forces of ultimate justice, thanks to the power of faithful love.

In the Yershalaim chapters no obvious direct references are made to Stalin's Russia, although perennial problems of tyranny, the courage required to withstand the forces of evil, and the destruction of innocence are raised. They do not need to be reduced to an allegory of the present to strike a chord in the mind of any modern reader, particularly since they belong to a historical moment that sets up paradigms of ethical dilemmas for all subsequent European culture. Pilate's vision of Tiberius with his ulcerated face; his fear of what might happen to him if he were to allow Yeshua's words about the transience of earthly power to go unpunished; the absolute nature of his own authority; and his remorse about his moment of cowardice—all these speak to us in their own right.

In identifying the episode of Satan's Ball as the only passage in the novel actually based on specific prototypes, we are not suggesting that the passage is inconsistent with the rest of the novel. The text elsewhere occasionally makes transparent allusions to real people or literary forebears. Although Gasparov's reading of the poet Riukhin as Mayakovsky, Bulgakov's bête noire in his attitudes toward culture, may be overstated,¹⁵ it nevertheless picks up one of those elusive threads of reference in The Master and Margarita that contribute a shade to the novel's meaning but do not dominate the design of the tapestry as a whole. A similar technique has been observed with regard to Bulgakov's use of literary and operatic references, as, for example, his playful use of motifs from Faust in Goethe's and Gounod's renderings. Gasparov himself rightly observes of the novel that “any link you establish turns out to be partial and fleeting, it carries an association rather than a direct likening or equation.”¹⁶ This holds true equally for the episode of Satan's Ball.

Woland has other, much more important roles to play in the novel than that of the American plenipotentiary: a supernatural force that complements the unadulterated goodness embodied in Yeshua; a judge and tempter who sets people back on a righteous course; an emissary from the other world sent to observe whether individuals have changed, and how they behave in the militant atheism of the Soviet state (a theme already broached in The Heart of a Dog). This is one reason why the guests featured at the ball seem so incongruous—why does Woland receive the perpetrators of evil at his feast if his role in the rest of the novel is to punish them? It marks the passage as one that may contain additional layers of meaning. Bulgakov's treatment of the ball, although ultimately appropriate given Woland's major purposes (damning Berlioz and enabling Margarita to win back her lover), nevertheless contains certain features that have something of the private joke about them. For the entertainment of his family and friends, Bulgakov here recalls the spectacular party thrown by Bullitt and Thayer for Stalin's henchmen by inserting into the text a satirical allegory he dares not risk elsewhere in The Master and Margarita.

Notes

1. The material in this essay on Charles Thayer is derived from his memoirs, Bears in the Caviar (London, 1952). This essay is based on talks originally given in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, beginning in May 1991.

2. Letter of August 5, 1934, cited in Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, vol. 2, ed. E. B. Nixon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 171 (hereafter referred to as Franklin D. Roosevelt).

3. Some of the entries from Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova's diary are quoted from the first version held in the Manuscript Section of the Lenin Library, Moscow (F 562, 29.5). Other extracts are quoted from my Manuscripts Don't Burn. Mikhail Bulgakov. A Life in Letters and Diaries (London: Bloomsbury, 1991) (hereafter referred to as Manuscripts Don't Burn). The text of the diary in its edited version is published by V. Losev and L. Ianovskaia, Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1990).

4. Manuscripts Don't Burn, 198-99.

5. Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 3, 207 (letter of February 22, 1936).

6. M. Chudakova drew attention to the links between the embassy ball and the version in the novel in her Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova, Moskva 12 (1988): 48-50, although discussion of it is for some reason passed over in her book published under the same title (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 419. A. Etkind in “Kem byl Voland, kogda on ne byl Satanoi?” Vremia i My 116 (1992): 202-34, addresses some of the issues raised in this essay, although he argues that Bulgakov's rendering of Satan's Ball has little connection with the event at the embassy.

7. See M. Chudakova, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia romana M. Bulgakova Master i Margarita,” Voprosy Literatury 1 (1976): 235-36; also her Zhizneopisaniia Mikhaila Bulgakova (Moscow: 1988), 389; and the publication of the early draft in M. Bulgakov, Velikii kantsler (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 150.

8. Master i Margarita in M. Bulgakov, Romany (Moscow: 1973), 667-68. References to this edition will henceforth be given directly after quotations in the text.

9. D. G. B. Piper, “An Approach to The Master and Margarita,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 7, no. 2 (1971): 146; M. P. Lamperini, “Glosse al 23ismo capitolo del Maestro e Margherita di M. A. Bulgakov,” Atti del Convegno “Michail Bulgakov”, (Milan, 1986), 281-86.

10. Thayer, Bears in the Caviar, 155-56.

11. Manuscripts Don't Burn, 199.

12. Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 2, 493-94 (letter of May 1, 1935).

13. Manuscripts Don't Burn, 221 (diary entry for February 21, 1936).

14. Barratt, Between Two Worlds: A Critical Introduction to The Master and Margarita (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 88.

15. Gasparov, “Iz nabliudenii nad motivnoi strukturoi romana M. A. Bulgakova Master i Margarita,” Slavica Hierosolymitana 3 (1978): 198-251.

16. Ibid., 203.