Rimsky's Flight

Rimsky's Flight marks the decisive collapse of the Variety Theatre's administrative order under the pressure of supernatural forces. After the disastrous black magic seance, the financial director Grigory Danilovich Rimsky finds himself alone in the theatre, besieged by a vampire and a possessed colleague, and is forced to flee Moscow in terror. The event confirms that the demonic intrusion into Soviet life is not merely a theatrical trick but a literal, physical threat that can shatter even the most pragmatic bureaucratic mind.

The Aftermath of the Seance

In the wake of the seance, Rimsky is the last senior official remaining in the theatre. The director Styopa Likhodeev has been mysteriously transported to Yalta, the administrator Varenukha has vanished, and the master of ceremonies Bengalsky has been taken to a psychiatric hospital after having his head torn off and restored on stage. Rimsky sits alone in his office, staring at the magic banknotes left from the performance, his wits addled. The telephones, which had been dead, suddenly ring, and a soft, lewd female voice whispers a warning: "Don't call anywhere, Rimsky, it'll be bad." The findirector's sharp hearing catches the distant trill of police whistles and the sound of a scandal in the street, where women who had exchanged their clothes at the seance's "ladies' shop" are now running about in their underwear. Rimsky realizes he must act, but his nerve has already broken.

The Return of Varenukha

At midnight, the door to Rimsky's office opens and Varenukha enters noiselessly. The findirector is initially relieved, but his seismographic sensitivity immediately detects something wrong. Varenukha claims that Styopa was found drunk in a tavern in Pushkino and that the Yalta telegrams were a hoax, but his story is a transparent lie. Rimsky notices that Varenukha casts no shadow, that his face is marked by an enormous bruise, and that his neck is wrapped in an old striped scarf despite the stifling heat. The administrator's voice has become hollow and coarse, and he fidgets strangely, trying to stay out of the light. Rimsky realizes that the man before him is no longer alive. When he presses the electric bell to summon help, the button sinks lifelessly into the desk—the bell is broken. Varenukha, seeing that he has been discovered, springs to the door and locks it.

The Vampire Attack

As Rimsky retreats to the window, he sees the face of a naked red-haired girl pressed against the glass. Her arm, lengthening like rubber and covered with putrid green, reaches through the vent-pane to open the latch. The smell of a cellar bursts into the room. The dead woman steps onto the window-sill, and Rimsky sees spots of decay on her breast. Varenukha, guarding the door, hops up and down, staying in the air and swaying, hissing and smacking his lips. Rimsky realizes his end has come. But at that moment, the joyful, unexpected crowing of a cock comes from the garden. The cock-crow is repeated, and the girl's face is distorted with savage fury. With the third crowing, she turns and flies out the window, followed by Varenukha, who stretches himself horizontally in the air like a flying cupid and floats over the desk.

The Flight to Leningrad

White as snow, his hair turned completely white, Rimsky rushes to the door, undoes the catch, and runs hurtling down the dark corridor. He steals past a sleeping watchman and slips out the main entrance. Hailing a cab, he offers the driver fifty roubles to take him to the Leningrad express. The driver, whose earlier passengers had been cheated by the magic money from the seance, is initially hostile but accepts the fare. At the train station, Rimsky tears banknotes from his briefcase, buys a ticket, and five minutes later the express train disappears from under the glass vault, vanishing clean away in the darkness. With it vanishes Rimsky, never to return to Moscow.

Thematic Significance

Rimsky's Flight is the novel's most explicit demonstration of the terror that underlies the seemingly comic surface of Woland's visit. The findirector, a man of pure bureaucratic rationality, is reduced to a trembling, white-haired old man by an encounter with the literal supernatural. The event echoes the novel's central theme that "cowardice is the most terrible of vices"—Rimsky does not fight or resist; he simply flees. His disappearance, like those of Likhodeev and Varenukha, leaves the Variety Theatre in chaos, its administrative structure shattered by forces it cannot comprehend. The cock-crow that saves him is a traditional apotropaic symbol, marking the boundary between the demonic night and the safe dawn, and confirming that the powers of darkness, however formidable, are subject to the natural order of day and night.