What It Is
The foreign currency, the dollars, that the retinue of Woland makes appear in the hands of Muscovites and that, in the novel's Moscow, is a crime to keep. In chapter 15, the scene satirizes real campaigns to confiscate gold and foreign currency in the USSR of the late 1920s and early 1930s, sustained by denunciation and imprisonment. The Torgsin store, in chapter 28, is the place where the same currency is the condition for buying.
Where It Appears
In chapter 9, the wad of rubles that Korovyov presses into the hand of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy turns into dollars in the ventilation duct, and he is arrested for currency speculation he never engaged in. In chapter 12, a rain of money falls on the audience of the Variety Theatre, and Woland, in the middle of the show, speaks of humanity's attachment to money.
They are people like any others. They like money, but it has always been so... Humanity likes money, no matter what it is made of: leather, paper, bronze, or gold. Well, they are frivolous... what can you do... mercy sometimes strikes their hearts... they are ordinary people... on the whole they remind one of people from the past... only the housing problem has corrupted them...
In chapter 15, Nikanor Ivanovich dreams, already sedated at the clinic, of a theater where the whole audience is called on to hand over the currency hidden at home.
Welcome, Nikanor Ivanovich! Hand over the foreign money!
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
In chapter 17, the theater's takings turn into something else in the hands of the treasurer Vasily Stepanovich, who is arrested right there for the crime from Nikanor's dream.
Before his eyes there was a heap of foreign money.
In chapter 27, among the investigation's testimonies, Annushka insists that the bill she received was ten rubles and not dollars. In chapter 28, Behemoth and Korovyov enter the Torgsin, and the house rule is stated at the door.
Here, sales are only for foreign money
Korovyov's speech does not defend theft, it lays out the criterion for entry, and the target is not the seller: it is the customer who can pay.he is wearing a lilac dress suit, he is bloated from so much salmon, but he has foreign money, and ours, what about ours?!
What It Means
In chapter 17, the retinue's punishment can be read as exposure, not as theft.
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.
In chapter 28, the Torgsin can be read as the novel's most documentary scene.
This is the novel's most directly documentary scene: the Torgsin stores existed, they sold food to anyone who handed over gold, silver, or foreign currency (see the foreign money), and they operated during the famine. Bulgakov's satire invents nothing, it simply puts two demons in line and lets the criterion speak for itself.
The same currency has two opposite roles in the novel: in the hands of Nikanor Ivanovich and Vasily Stepanovich it is the crime for which they are arrested, and at the Torgsin counter it is what separates those who enter from those who stay out. Korovyov, in the store, does not argue about the cat's theft, he argues about who has the money that opens the door.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Money and wealth, Greed, Social class.
- Characters: Woland, Korovyov, Behemoth.
- Place: Moscow.
- Neighboring symbols: apartment 50, where Nikanor Ivanovich receives the wad, and Stravinsky's clinic, where he dreams of handing it over.