Quote:
Originally Posted by bobh_6
I bought the novel " Masters and Margarita" can you give me a clue what chapters the enf segments are in. thanks very mutch. bobh_6
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Hi bobh,
Sorry for the late reply for this request. Maybe you've already found the sections. For you, or for anyone else, the relevant parts of the book are Chapter 12,
'Black Magic & Its Exposure', Chapter 14
'Glory To The Cock!' and the
Epilogue. Chapter 12 sets up the black magic show that the Devil puts on, and in this chapter the women in the Variety Theater put on the clothes that will later disappear. However, Bulgakov doesn't describe that until Chapter 14. I've copied out the relevant quote here:
'Rimsky's extremely sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in itself never bodes anything pleasant. But when it was repeated and, to assist it, another joined in . . . and to them was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector understood at once that something scandalous and vile had happened in the street . . . In the bright glare of the strongest street lights he saw, just below him on the sidewalk, a lady in nothing but a shift and violet bloomers. True, there was a little hat on the lady's head and an umbrella in her hands . . . The lady was in a state of utter consternation, now crouching down, now making as if to run somewhere . . . Grigory Danilovich saw a second lady, in pink underwear. She leaped from the street to the sidewalk, striving to hide in the hallway, but the audience pouring out blocked the way, and the poor victim of her own flightiness and passion for dressing up . . . dreamed of only one thing - falling through the earth.'
In this passage, we can see that the women are portrayed as being just in their underwear. However, in the epilogue, we find this:
'The writer of these truthful lines himself, personally, on a trip to Feodosiya, heard a story on the train about two thousand persons in Moscow coming out of a theater stark-naked in the literal sense of the word and in that fashion returning home in taxi-cabs.'
So here, they are described as completely naked. This has left those attempting adaptations of the story a choice between showing the victims naked or in their underwear. Most have followed 'naked' route, thank goodness, though some haven't, such as Alexsandr Dzekun's 1989 TV series. Let's hope the forthcoming Hollywood adaptation, still tentatively pencilled in for this year (though that's probably way too optimistic) keeps up the tradition, although recent rumours that Tim Burton might be directing don't give me much hope, frankly.