10-12 (ABC)

The nude lady might be Bulgakov’s way of drawing attention to someone or something, and this character definitely has something peculiar about her. When she places her palms on Varenukha’s already soaked and cold shoulders he feels that “those palms were still colder” (128). This and the earlier occasion with the naked woman in the bathtub reminded me of The Shining. I haven’t seen the movie in years, but I distinctly remember there being an evil, naked, wet woman in a bathroom who turned old and really scary once Jack Nicholson decides to join her. I believe the woman in The Shining wants to kiss Nicholson just as this woman wants to kiss Varenukha. My first thought, as anyone will guess, was that these women’s kisses would be the kiss of death. We don’t know for sure that Varenukha is dead after the tenth chapter, but he is said to have “fainted and never felt the kiss” in the end (128). I guess we will wait and see what this woman’s kiss does to him.

Speaking of death—what a wonderful topic—I realized that we have not addressed a basic belief that goes along with religion. Where do the characters in this novel go once they are dead? We have already lost Berlioz, and who knows who else, but where is he now? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Nowhere at all? I think if we can find out where the dead go we will find out more about the world in which this novel takes place.
Once Ivan has split into the new and the old Ivan, the new one begins rationalizing the grand character of Professor Woland. He thinks:

Instead of raising that idiotic row at the Patriarch’s Ponds, it would have been much more sensible to question him [Woland] civilly about what happened later to Pilate and that prisoner Ha-Nozri. And look what I did! Such a great matter—an editor was run over! (132).

Ivan, or at least this part of his psyche, seems to feel some sort of guilt for Berlioz’s death. He seems to suggest that had he had a more civil conversation with he who foretold Berlioz’s death, or Woland, and then he could have saved Berlioz. We now know he is on his way to actually losing his mind if he hasn’t already, so perhaps this is nothing.
-Golden Horseshoe