Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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him. He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought:
"What's the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart's
acting up ... I'm overworked . .. Maybe it's time to send it all to the
devil and go to Kislovodsk . . .'[5]
And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent
citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked
jockey's cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air
... A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably
thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy.
The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to
extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and
thought in consternation: 'This can't be! . . .'
But, alas, it was, and the long, see-through citizen was swaying before
him to the left and to the right without touching the ground.
Here terror took such possession of Berlioz that he shut his eyes. When
he opened them again, he saw that it was all over, the phantasm had
dissolved, the checkered one had vanished, and with that the blunt needle
had popped out of his heart.
'Pah, the devil!' exclaimed the editor. 'YOU know, Ivan, I nearly had
heatstroke just now! There was even something like a hallucination . ..' He
attempted to smile, but alarm still jumped in his eyes and his hands
trembled. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his
handkerchief and, having said rather cheerfully: 'Well, and so . . .', went
on with the conversation interrupted by their soda-drinking.
This conversation, as was learned afterwards, was about Jesus Christ.
The thing was that the editor had commissioned from the poet a long
anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had