LITERATURE: The Master and Margarita – Flight & The Fourth Wall

The naked Margarita is happily flying on her broom above the apartment house where she’s wreaked havoc on Latunsky’s apartment and is smashing windows in every other when through a window she spots a small boy in bed, evidently frightened. She flys in to comfort him. "It’s just some boys breaking windows," she tells him.

"I’ll tell you a fairy tale," said Margarita, and put her burning hand on top of the boy’s close-cropped head.  "Once upon a time there was a lady.  She had no children, and no happiness either.  And at first she cried for a long time, but then she became wicked…" Margarita fell silent, and took her hand away—the boy was sleeping.  (p. 206)

Margarita, turned into a witch by the devil in exchange for information about her lover, has forsaken all the reality of her former life, her nice but uninspiring husband, her finery; everything that it would seem a large portion of Russian women would give their eyeteeth to have.  But for Margarita, it is freedom to be, to love, to seek justice and revenge.  Evidently, tippy-toeing around wasn’t Margarita’s chosen style and flying nude on a broom may be what she’s repressed all her life.  Repression, the Russian way of life for its citizens at that time.  Yet she’s still retained the heart of a woman as she offers some comfort to the little boy who’s a stranger to her.

One other thing I caught in this book (besides a double "the" on p. 207) was another tear in the fourth wall:

Margarita stepped back and said with dignity, "Go to the devil’s mother.  What do you mean, Claudine?  Mind who you’re talking to," and, after a second’s thought, she added a long, unprintable oath.  All this had a sobering effect on the thoughtless fat man." (p. 210)

Note "a long unprintable oath." This, dear reader, is directed to us.

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