Who He Is
Chairman of the residents' association of the building that houses apartment 50 (see apartment 50), besieged by thirty-two complaints from neighbors who want Berlioz's vacant rooms. He appears in two episodes: the deal with Korovyov and the dream at the clinic.
What does it mean to be an official or an unofficial representative? It all depends on the point of view from which you look at the object. All of it, Nikanor Ivanovich, is relative and unstable.
Trajectory
In chapter 9 he enters the sealed apartment and finds Korovyov at the table of the deceased, who rents the apartment from him for a week for Woland, pays in rubles against a receipt, and presses an extra wad into his hand, which he hides in the ventilation duct of his own bathroom. A phone denunciation, made by Korovyov himself pretending to be a neighbor, leads the police there: the wad has turned into dollars (see the foreign money), and Nikanor Ivanovich is arrested for currency speculation he never engaged in.
In chapter 15, under interrogation, he confesses the bribe and denies the crime he is accused of: he admits to having accepted the wad, says it was Soviet money, and swears he never touched foreign currency.
I accepted the money! Yes, I accepted it, only it was our money, Soviet money!
Later, sedated at Stravinsky's clinic, he dreams that he is called to a stage where a genial host asks the audience to hand over the foreign money hidden at home. In the dream he keeps denying it, and he pins the bathroom dollars on the translator in checkered clothes. He wakes shouting that he has nothing, and the alarm spreads through the neighboring rooms, among them the Master's and Ivan's.
Welcome, Nikanor Ivanovich! Hand over the foreign money!
That's right, I don't have it
A child, an anonymous letter, a pamphlet, a time bomb, and heaven knows what else, but no one would get rid of four hundred dollars
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that run through him are Money and wealth and Truth and lies. The reading of chapter 17 on the form of the retinue's punishments, in which he is one of the three cases cited:
As in Nikanor's case, in chapter 9, and in the magic show of chapter 12, Woland's troupe turns money into something other than what it seemed. Nikanor's punishment and now that of Vasily Stepanovich share the same form: the money is not stolen, it becomes evidence against whoever touches it.
Relationships
- Korovyov: who rents the apartment from him, pays in rubles, and denounces him over dollars.
- Berlioz: the dead man whose vacant rooms open the episode.
- The Master and Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny: the roommates at the clinic whom his shout wakes.