What happens in Chapter 10 of The Master and Margarita?
Chapter 10 opens at the Variety Theatre's offices, where the financial director Rimsky and the administrator Varenukha are trying to make sense of the mess left by Woland. Telegrams start arriving from Yalta, supposedly sent by Styopa Likhodeev — the theatre's director who, as we know, was whisked away there by Woland's entourage. The telegrams grow more frantic and strange: Styopa pleads for confirmation of his identity and begs for money, claiming he is stuck in Yalta with no recollection of how he got there. Rimsky and Varenukha read the messages with increasing disbelief, convinced that Styopa is drunk and concocting an elaborate excuse. Varenukha is sent to take the telegrams to the police, but he never makes it — intercepted, as we later find out, by Azazello and Hella, who turn him into a vampire. Left alone, Rimsky begins to feel that something is very wrong; the chapter ends with a sense of mounting dread as the theatre's bureaucratic environment proves utterly unprepared for the supernatural events unfolding around it.
Analysis
Bulgakov uses Chapter 10 to illustrate dramatic irony at its finest: the reader knows what Rimsky and Varenukha do not, and their attempts to rationalize the situation — attributing it to drunkenness, insubordination, or a prank — gradually transform into something more disturbing. The telegrams serve as a motif for failed communication, a recurring theme throughout the novel; official language and bureaucratic processes prove to be utterly inadequate when faced with the truly inexplicable. Bulgakov's satire is particularly sharp here — the absurdity of Soviet institutional life, with its forms, stamps, and hierarchy, emerges precisely because it is rigid. This chapter also marks a shift in tone. The broad, carnival-like comedy of Woland's séance transitions to a more subdued, sinister atmosphere: Varenukha's disappearance occurs off the page, in the space between scenes, which feels far more unsettling than any overt horror. Rimsky's growing discomfort in the final passages is captured through physical details — a stillness in the room, a hesitance to move — rather than through melodrama, bringing Bulgakov's prose closer to the Gothic. Additionally, this chapter strengthens the novel's structural argument: Moscow's bureaucrats are not villains but rather individuals trapped by their own limits of understanding, unable to envision a reality where the rules they enforce simply do not apply.
Key quotes from Chapter 10
“I am in Yalta. Kindly confirm identity. Likhodeev.”
The first of Styopa's desperate telegrams, its clipped bureaucratic form making the impossible plea all the more darkly comic.
“Rimsky stared at the telegram for a long time, then looked up at Varenukha, and they both thought the same thought: this was not normal.”
The moment rational certainty begins to crack for Rimsky, signalling the chapter's tonal shift from satire toward dread.
“Varenukha took the telegrams and went out, and was never seen to arrive.”
Bulgakov's understated narration of Varenukha's interception — the horror residing entirely in the gap the sentence leaves open.