What happens in Chapter 21 of The Master and Margarita?
Chapter 21 opens with Margarita, freshly coated in Azazello's magical cream, realizing she's become weightless and invisible. She glides through her apartment building, stopping to take gleeful revenge on the critic Latunsky—whom she blames for the Master's downfall—by smashing his flat to bits. Next, she hops onto a broomstick conjured by the demon Azazello and launches herself into the Moscow night sky, soaring over rooftops and rivers. Natasha, her maid, follows on a flying hog after using the leftover cream. The two women zoom through the darkened city, Margarita feeling exhilarated and completely transformed. She encounters the river-spirit Nikolai Ivanovich—her neighbor, absurdly riding another enchanted creature—before Azazello leads her onward to meet Woland's retinue. By the end of the chapter, Margarita has shed all traces of her former bourgeois life and arrives, naked and laughing, at the threshold of the devil's domain, ready to serve as Queen of the Grand Ball.
Analysis
Bulgakov engineers Chapter 21 as a striking tonal shift: the novel's satirical realism gives way to a wild, carnivalesque adventure, and this transition feels both intentional and exhilarating. Margarita's destruction of Latunsky's apartment serves as the chapter's moral turning point—an act of vandalism presented as poetic justice. Bulgakov allows her to revel in it unapologetically, fully aligning the reader's sympathies with her rage. The cream acts as a reverse baptism: instead of cleansing, it strips away social identity, leaving only raw desire and agency.
The aerial scenes use speed and height as symbols of liberation. Moscow from above appears both stunning and diminished—its bureaucratic layout rendered absurd from this vantage point. Natasha's comedic chase on the hog broadens the chapter's scope, introducing slapstick elements alongside the sublime and keeping the flight from devolving into mere wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Bulgakov's prose shifts mid-chapter, transitioning from detailed descriptions of Latunsky's destroyed belongings to lyrical impressions of moonlight on the river and wind in Margarita's hair. This oscillation reflects his style throughout the novel: a blend of the mundane and the miraculous held in ironic tension. The motif of nakedness recurs—Margarita sheds her clothes as she sheds constraints—foreshadowing the ritual nudity of the Satanic Ball. The chapter concludes with a threshold image, underscoring the novel's ongoing exploration of liminal states: existing between worlds, identities, and the tension between complicity and freedom.
Key quotes from Chapter 21
“Invisible and free! Invisible and free!”
Margarita repeats this phrase to herself as she first takes flight over Moscow, the doubled exclamation capturing both her euphoria and the novel's central fantasy of escape from Soviet surveillance.
“She flew over the rooftops, over the sleeping city, and laughed.”
Bulgakov's narrator describes Margarita mid-flight, the laughter marking her complete break from the anxious, constrained woman of the novel's earlier chapters.
“She was not sorry for anything she had left behind.”
As Margarita departs Moscow's skyline, this single declarative sentence closes off her bourgeois past with surgical finality, signalling her irrevocable transformation.