Chapter summary
The Griboyedov House, seat of Massolit, is divided into offices that administer the association's privileges, such as trips, summer houses, creative permits and the line at the door marked "Housing Problems," and into a restaurant considered the best in Moscow. The narrator lingers on the effect this has on someone arriving from outside: the visitor soon realizes how good the members' life is and begins to envy whoever carries the coffee-colored membership card, with gold trim, that smells of expensive leather. At half past ten at night, when Berlioz has just died, twelve men of letters sweat in a room on the upper floor waiting for him for the meeting, complain of the heat and envy whoever has a dacha in Perelygino, the writers' summer village. At midnight, with no news of him, they go down to the restaurant, where the jazz orchestra begins to play and everyone dances. When news of the death arrives, the music stops and the hall is moved, but soon the thought prevails that those present are alive and can go on dining. Zheldybin, Berlioz's substitute, returns from the morgue, settles into the dead man's office and summons the board to discuss the wake, and the restaurant resumes its ordinary night.
In this restaurant Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny appears, barefoot, in long underwear, with a lit wedding candle and a paper icon pinned to his chest with a safety pin. He shouts that the consultant who killed Berlioz is loose and must be caught before he causes disasters, but he cannot recall the foreigner's surname, only the initial W, and searches through Wagner, Weiner and other German names. He demands that the police be called with five motorcycles with machine guns, and begins to search the hall. A man in glasses, summoned as a doctor, tries to calm him, and Ivan slaps him; the waiters tie him up with towels. The restaurant manager, Archibald Archibaldovich, scolds the doorman for letting in a man in his underwear and orders the police called. The poet Riukhin, the doorman, a policeman and a waiter take Ivan, bandaged, weeping and spitting at Riukhin, whom he calls a scoundrel and a cad, in a truck to the psychiatric hospital.
Analysis
Ivan arrives at Massolit because, in the previous chapter, he became convinced that the professor would be there, and there are people there who know him: he asks his colleagues for the one thing left to him, that they catch the killer. The slap comes when a man in glasses, called a doctor with shouts, tries to calm him and addresses him as Comrade Bezdomny. Treated as a patient, he responds with violence, and that reaction gives the waiters and the police the reason to tie him up.
He would soon understand how good the life of the fortunate Massolit members was, and would soon begin to gnaw at himself with envy, tormented. And he would soon direct bitter complaints to the heavens for not having endowed him, at birth, with literary talent, without which, naturally, he could not even dream of owning a Massolit membership card, the color of coffee, which smells of expensive leather and has a broad gold trim
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