Gennadiy Kalinovskiykalinovski.narod.ruWell, it's time to bring out the big guns! Gennadiy Kalinovskiy's illustrations for The Master and Margarita are, without a doubt, some of the best ever created.
But first, a few words about the artist. Gennadiy Kalinovskiy was born in Stavropol in 1929. At just 14 years old, his work The Death of the Nibelungs won first prize in a competition by the newspaper Pioneer's Truth, and the young artist himself received a recommendation to study at the Moscow Secondary Art School, and from there, it all took off. Throughout his career, Kalinovsky illustrated Robin Hood, Winnie-the-Pooh and All, All, All, Mary Poppins, Gulliver's Travels, and many other books for children and adults. He achieved nationwide fame for his wonderful illustrations for Alice in Wonderland in the translation (or rather, the retelling) by Boris Zakhoder.
For his illustrations for The Master and Margarita, Gennadiy Kalinovskiy received the Grand Prix at the Book of the Year 2002 competition.
By the way, if you like these works, you can buy a book with these illustrations—the novel has been published with them more than once, and many editions can be easily found in online stores.
And then the sultry air before him thickened, and out of this air was woven a transparent citizen of a most strange appearance. On his small head was a jockey's cap, and he wore a plaid, short, and likewise airy jacket... The citizen was a fathom tall, but narrow in the shoulders, impossibly thin, and his physiognomy, if I may draw your attention to it, was sneering.
He appeared to be over forty. His mouth was somehow crooked. He was cleanly shaven. A brunette. His right eye was black, and his left, for some reason, was green. His eyebrows were black, but one was higher than the other. In a word—a foreigner.
Berlioz's eyes bulged. “At breakfast... to Kant? What is he going on about?” he thought.
From the garden platform, two legionaries brought and set before the procurator's armchair a man of about twenty-seven. This man was dressed in an old and torn blue chiton. His head was covered by a white bandage with a strap around his forehead, and his hands were bound behind his back. Under the man's left eye was a large bruise, and in the corner of his mouth was a scratch with clotted blood. The man who had been brought in looked at the procurator with an uneasy curiosity.
A swallow's wings whistled right above the hegemon's head, the bird darted to the fountain basin and flew to freedom. The procurator raised his eyes to the prisoner and saw that a pillar of dust had ignited near him.
On the upper terrace of the garden, by the two white marble lions guarding the staircase, the procurator met the acting president of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high priest Joseph Caiaphas.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Pilate, and with every word it became easier and easier for him: there was no need to pretend anymore. No need to choose his words. “You have complained about me to Caesar too often, and now my hour has come, Caiaphas!”
Pilate turned and walked back across the bridge to the steps, looking at nothing but the multi-colored checkers of the decking beneath his feet, so as not to stumble. He knew that now, behind him on the platform, bronze coins and dates were raining down, that in the wailing crowd, people, crushing each other, were climbing onto shoulders to see with their own eyes the miracle—how a man who had already been in the hands of death had broken free from those hands!
Berlioz did not listen to the begging and whining regent; he ran to the turnstile and grabbed it with his hand. Turning it, he was just about to step onto the rails when red and white light splashed in his face: the inscription “Beware of the tram!” lit up in a glass box.
Ivan gasped, looked into the distance, and saw the hateful stranger. He was already at the exit to Patriarch's Lane, and not alone at that. The more than dubious regent had managed to join him. But that was not all: the third in this company turned out to be a cat that had appeared from who knows where, as huge as a boar, as black as soot or a rook, and with desperate cavalry mustaches. Ivan rushed after the villains and immediately realized that it would be very difficult to catch them.
Then everyone saw that it was no ghost at all, but Ivan Nikolaevich Bezdomny—the most famous poet. He was barefoot, in a torn whitish shirt, to which was pinned with a safety pin a paper icon with the effaced image of an unknown saint, and in striped white underpants. In his hand, Ivan Nikolaevich carried a lighted wedding candle. It is difficult to even measure the depth of the silence that reigned on the veranda. It was visible that beer was flowing from one of the waiters' crooked mugs onto the floor.
(Pay attention: Ivanushka is being stared down by the pirate Archibald Archibaldovich)
Suddenly, the door to Ivan's room opened, and a multitude of people in white coats entered. Ahead of everyone walked a man of about forty-five, carefully and theatrically shaved, with pleasant but very piercing eyes and polite manners. The entire retinue showed him signs of attention and respect, and his entrance was therefore very solemn. “Like Pontius Pilate!” Ivan thought to himself.
The guest was no longer alone in the bedroom but in company. In the second armchair sat that same type who had been seen in the anteroom. On the jeweler's pouf, in a sprawling pose, a third person was sprawled out—specifically, a gigantic black cat with a stack of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to skewer a pickled mushroom, in the other. Directly from the trumeau mirror came a small but extraordinarily broad-shouldered man, with a bowler hat on his head and a tusk sticking out of his mouth, disfiguring an already unprecedentedly vile face. And on top of that, he was fiery red-haired.
At the deceased's table sat an unknown, skinny and tall citizen in a plaid jacket, jockey's cap, and pince-nez... in a word, the very same one. “Aha! Nikanor Ivanovich,” the unexpected citizen shouted in a rattling tenor and, jumping up, greeted the chairman with a forceful and sudden handshake. This greeting did not please Nikanor Ivanovich at all.
The same woman appeared in the doorway, and both Rimsky and Varenukha rose to meet her, and she took not a white, but some dark sheet from her bag.
Running past the shooting gallery, Varenukha came to a thick thicket of lilac, in which stood the bluish building of a restroom. The administrator suddenly heard a voice behind him purring: “Is that you, Ivan Savelyevich?” Varenukha shuddered, turned around, and saw some small plump man behind him, as it seemed, with a cat-like face.
Both ruffians disappeared, and in their place appeared a completely naked girl—red-haired, with burning phosphorescent eyes. Varenukha understood that this was the most terrible thing that had happened to him, and, groaning, he recoiled against the wall.
The cat latched onto the master of ceremonies' thin hair and, howling wildly, with two turns tore this head from his full neck. Two and a half thousand people in the theater screamed as one. Blood from the torn arteries in the neck gushed up in fountains and drenched his dress shirt and tailcoat. The cat handed the head to Fagott, who lifted it by the hair and showed it to the audience, and this head screamed desperately for the entire theater: “Call a doctor!”
Varenukha, guarding the door, was jumping near it, lingering in the air for a long time and swaying in it. With his crooked fingers, he waved towards Rimsky, hissed and smacked his lips, winking at the girl in the window. Rimsky let out a weak cry, leaned against the wall, and held his briefcase out like a shield. The window frame swung wide open, but instead of the night's freshness and the scent of linden trees, the smell of a cellar burst into the room. The deceased woman stepped onto the windowsill. Rimsky clearly saw the spots of decay on her chest.
A mysterious figure appeared on the balcony, hiding from the moonlight, and shook its finger at Ivan. Ivan, without any fear, sat up on the bed and saw that a man was on the balcony. And this man, pressing a finger to his lips, whispered: “Shhh!”
“Oh, it was a golden age,” the narrator whispered, his eyes shining, “little windows right above the small sidewalk leading from the gate. Opposite, four steps away, under the fence, were lilacs, a linden tree, and a maple. I opened the windows and sat in the second, very tiny room. And my head became light from fatigue, and Pilate was flying to the end.”
“Well, naturally, I went out for walks. I had a wonderful grey suit.”
“She carried in her hands some repulsive, disturbing yellow flowers. The devil knows what they're called, but for some reason, they are the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out very distinctly against her black spring coat. Thousands of people were walking along Tverskaya, but I guarantee you, she saw me alone and looked not so much troubled as even pained. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by the extraordinary, never-before-seen loneliness in her eyes!”
The sun was already setting over Bald Mountain, but the heat was still unbearable, and the soldiers in both cordons suffered from it, languished with boredom, and cursed the three robbers in their hearts, sincerely wishing them a quick death. On the mutilated face of Ratslayer, neither fatigue nor displeasure was expressed.
“Your presence at the funeral is canceled,” the cat continued in an official voice. “Please proceed to your place of residence.” And he roared at the door: “Azazello!” At his call, a small, limping, red-haired man, tightly clad in black tights, with a knife tucked into a leather belt, a yellow tusk, and a cataract on his left eye, ran into the anteroom. Poplavsky felt that he couldn't breathe, got up from the chair, and backed away, clutching his heart.
“A completely bandit's mug!” Margarita thought, peering at her street interlocutor. “I don't know you,” Margarita said dryly. “How could you know me! And yet, I have been sent to you on business.”
Margarita felt herself free, free from everything. In addition, she understood with all clarity that exactly what she had a premonition of in the morning had happened, and that she was leaving the mansion and her former life forever. But from that former life, one thought still broke off: that she had to fulfill just one last duty before the beginning of something new, unusual, something pulling her up into the air.
Invisible and free!
A heavy noise of torn air was heard from behind and began to overtake Margarita. Gradually, a woman's laughter, audible for many versts, joined this noise of something flying like a projectile. Slowing down, Natasha caught up with Margarita.
The light came closer, and Margarita saw the illuminated face of a man, tall and black, holding this very lamp. It was Koroviev, also known as Fagott. True, Koroviev's appearance had changed considerably. The flickering light was not reflected in a cracked pince-nez, which should have been thrown in the garbage long ago, but in a monocle, which was also cracked. The mustache on the impudent face was curled and pomaded, and Koroviev's blackness was explained very simply—he was in a tailcoat. Only his chest was white.
The room turned out to be very small. Margarita saw a wide oak bed with rumpled and dirty sheets and a pillow. Among those present, Margarita immediately recognized Azazello, now dressed in a tailcoat and standing at the head of the bed. The naked witch, that same Hella, was sitting on a rug on the floor by the bed, stirring something in a pot from which sulfurous steam was rising. Besides these, there was also in the room, sitting on a high stool in front of a chess table, a gigantic black tomcat, holding a chess knight in his right paw.
The ball immediately descended upon her as light, and with it, sound and smell. Carried along by Koroviev's arm, Margarita found herself in a tropical forest. Red-breasted green-tailed parrots clung to the lianas, jumped along them, and screamed deafeningly: “I am delighted!” But the forest quickly ended, and its bathhouse stuffiness was immediately replaced by the coolness of a ballroom with columns of some yellowish, sparkling stone. This hall, just like the forest, was completely empty.
Margarita was set in place, and a low amethyst column was under her left hand. “You can rest your hand on it if it becomes too difficult,” Koroviev whispered. Margarita tried to look around. Koroviev and Azazello were standing beside her in parade poses. Next to Azazello were three more young men who vaguely reminded Margarita of Abaddona.
Now a stream of people was rising up the staircase from below. Margarita stopped seeing what was happening in the antechamber. She mechanically raised and lowered her arm and, with a uniform grin, smiled at the guests.
Neither Gaius Caesar Caligula nor Messalina interested Margarita anymore, just as none of the kings, dukes, cavaliers, suicides, poisoners, hangmen, and procuresses, jailers and cardsharps, executioners, informers, traitors, madmen, detectives, and debauchers interested her. All their names were confused in her head, their faces stuck together into one gigantic pancake, and only one face, framed by a truly fiery beard, the face of Malyuta Skuratov, sat painfully in her memory.
(The face of famous slaughterman Malyuta Skuratov is obviously on the right)
Then she flew over a glass floor with hellish furnaces burning beneath it and devilish white cooks dashing between them. Then somewhere, already ceasing to comprehend anything, she saw dark cellars where some lamps were burning, where girls were serving hissing meat on hot coals, where they were drinking from large mugs to her health.
It struck Margarita that Woland came out for this last grand exit at the ball in exactly the same appearance he had in the bedroom. The same dirty patched shirt was hanging on his shoulders, his feet were in worn-out bedroom slippers. “Mikhail Alexandrovich,” Woland said softly to the head, and then the eyelids of the dead man lifted, and on his dead face, Margarita, shuddering, saw living eyes full of thought and suffering.
“I drink to your health, gentlemen,” Woland said softly and, raising the cup, touched it with his lips. Then a metamorphosis occurred. The patched shirt and worn-out slippers disappeared. Woland was in some kind of black chlamys with a steel sword on his hip. He quickly approached Margarita, offered her the cup, and said commandingly: “Drink!”
“I want my lover, the Master, returned to me immediately, this very second,” said Margarita, and her face was contorted by a convulsion. From the windowsill, a greenish patch of night light fell onto the floor, and in it appeared Ivanushka's nocturnal guest, who called himself the Master. He was in his hospital attire—in a dressing gown, slippers, and a black cap with which he never parted. His unshaven face was twitching with a grimace, he was looking crazily and fearfully at the candle flames, and the moon's stream was boiling around him.
At the very exit doors of the sixth entrance, Azazello blew upwards, and as they stepped out into the courtyard, which the moon did not enter, they saw a man in boots and a cap sleeping on the porch, and apparently sleeping a dead sleep, as well as a large black car with extinguished headlights standing by the entrance. In the front glass, the silhouette of a rook was vaguely visible.
Annushka hid the find in her bosom, grabbed the can, and was about to slip back into the apartment, postponing her trip into the city, when the very same man with the white chest, without a jacket, grew before her, the devil knows from where, and whispered quietly: “Give me the horseshoe and the little napkin.” “What little napkin-horseshoe?” asked Annushka, pretending very skillfully. “I don't know any little napkin. What's wrong, citizen, are you drunk or something?” With fingers as hard as bus handrails and just as cold, the white-chested man, without saying another word, squeezed Annushka's throat so that all access of air to her chest was completely cut off. The can fell from Annushka's hands to the floor.
The darkness that had come from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the terrible Tower of Antonia disappeared, an abyss descended from the sky and flooded the winged gods over the hippodrome, the Hasmonean Palace with its embrasures, the bazaars, the caravanserais, the alleys, the ponds... Yershalaim—the great city—was gone, as if it had never existed. All was devoured by the darkness, which terrified everything living in Yershalaim and its surroundings.
At this time, there was only one person under the columns, and that person was the procurator. Now he was not sitting in a chair, but lying on a couch at a low small table.
The man who had arrived lay down; a servant poured thick red wine into his cup. Another servant, bending cautiously over Pilate's shoulder, filled the procurator's cup. After this, he motioned for both servants to leave. While the man who had arrived was drinking and eating, Pilate, sipping his wine, looked at his guest with squinted eyes. The man who had appeared before Pilate was middle-aged, with a very pleasant, rounded, and neat face, with a fleshy nose.
Before he began to speak, Afranius, as was his custom, looked around and moved into the shadows and, having made sure that besides Banga there were no other unnecessary people on the balcony, he said quietly: “I ask to be brought to trial, procurator. You were right. I failed to protect Judas of Kiriath; he was stabbed. I request a trial and my dismissal.”
Instead of Afranius, an unknown small and skinny man entered the balcony. The man who had arrived, under forty, was black, ragged, covered in dried mud, and looked wolfish, from under his brow. In a word, he was very unattractive and most likely resembled a city beggar, of whom many thronged on the temple terraces or in the bazaars of the noisy and dirty Lower City.
“I challenge you to a duel!” the cat roared, flying over their heads on a swinging chandelier, and then a Browning pistol appeared in his paws again. The cat took aim and, flying like a pendulum over the heads of the newcomers, opened fire on them. The thunder shook the apartment. Now there could be no question of taking the cat alive, and the newcomers, aiming accurately and furiously, shot back at him from their Mausers, at his head, at his stomach, at his chest, and at his back.
The public began to surround the villains, and then Koroviev intervened. “Citizens!” he cried in a thin, vibrating voice. “What is going on here? Eh? Allow me to ask you that! A poor man,” Koroviev let a tremor into his voice and pointed at Behemoth, who immediately put on a tearful face, “a poor man has been fixing primus stoves all day; he's hungry... and where is he supposed to get currency from?”
(A fake foreigner glances at Koroviev over his shoulder. And in the crowd, a teenage pickpocket is cleaning out a lady's handbag)
At sunset, high above the city on a stone terrace of one of Moscow's most beautiful buildings, a building built about a hundred and fifty years ago, stood two people: Woland and Azazello. They were not visible from below, from the street, as they were hidden from unnecessary gazes by a balustrade with plaster vases and plaster flowers. But the city was visible to them almost to its very edges. Woland looked unblinkingly at the immense collection of palaces, giant houses, and small hovels doomed to demolition.
“Fire!” Margarita cried terribly. The small window in the basement slammed, the curtain was blown aside by the wind. In the sky, there was a cheerful and brief rumble. Azazello stuck his clawed hand into the stove, pulled out a smoking firebrand, and set the tablecloth on the table on fire. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and after that, the manuscript and the curtain on the window. The Master, already intoxicated by the coming ride, threw some book from the shelf onto the table, fluffed its pages in the burning tablecloth, and the book flared up with a cheerful fire. “Burn, burn, former life!”
The room was already swaying in crimson columns, and along with the smoke, the three of them ran out the door, went up the stone staircase, and found themselves in the courtyard. The first thing they saw there was the builder's cook sitting on the ground; next to her lay scattered potatoes and several bunches of onions. The cook's state was understandable. Three black horses snorted near the shed, shuddered, and threw up fountains of earth.
With a practiced hand, the Master pushed aside the balcony grate in room No. 117; Margarita followed him. They entered Ivanushka's room, invisible and unnoticed, during the rumble and howl of the thunderstorm. Ivanushka was lying motionless, just as he had been when he first watched a thunderstorm in his house of rest. He sat up, stretched out his hands, and said joyfully: “Ah, it's you! I've been waiting and waiting for you. Here you are, my neighbor.”
Even the magical black horses were tired and carried their riders slowly, and the inevitable night began to overtake them. Sensing it behind his back, even the restless Behemoth fell silent and, clinging to the saddle with his claws, flew silently and seriously, fluffing out his tail. The night began to cover the forests and meadows with a black scarf, the night lit sad little lights somewhere far below, now uninteresting and unnecessary to Margarita or the Master, stranger's lights. The night overtook the cavalcade, sifting down on it from above and throwing out here and there white specks of stars in the saddened sky.
Woland reined in his horse on a stony, joyless, flat summit, and then the riders moved at a walk, listening to their horses' hooves crushing flints and stones. The moon bathed the platform in a green and bright light, and Margarita soon made out a chair in the desolate area and a white figure of a man sitting in it.
“Oh, thrice-romantic Master, do you really not want to walk with your companion under the cherry trees that are just beginning to bloom during the day, and listen to Schubert's music in the evening? Will it not be pleasant for you to write by candlelight with a goose quill? Do you not want, like Faust, to sit over a retort hoping that you will succeed in creating a new homunculus? There, over there. A house and an old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn. This way, Master, this way. Farewell! I must go.”
