Scenes from the novel

His Excellency

Vladimir Bortko/p>

At the end of Woland's show in the Variety Theatre Bulgakov describes how there was an illusion of having heard once upon a time, under southern stars, in a cafe-chantant, some «barely intelligible, half-blind, but rollicking words to a march». Those words are an adaptation by Bulgakov from the vaudeville Lev Gurych Sinichkin from 1839, written by Dmitri Timofeevich Lensky and filmed by Alexandr Belinsky in 1974.

Here you can hear Bulgakov's adaptation of the words as they were filmed by Vladimir Bortko in 2005.