Spared in part by hyperbole, Rimsky manages to outsmart the Variety Theater’s vampiric administrator in Chapter 14. As Varenukha returns to the theater with updates about Styopa’s disappearance, the theater director begins to sense that something is awry:
Varenukha continued his story, and the more he spoke, the more vividly the chain of Likhodeyev’s scandalous antics and outrages unfolded before the financial manager. And every link in this chain was worse than the preceding one.
Varenukha’s vampiric substitute embellishes with hyperbole to the point where he loses his grip on truth. In his account, Styopa does not merely wake up in apartment 50 with a hangover—he also dances drunkenly with the telegrapher, chases women, smashes wine bottles, throws punches at the Yalta bartender, and breaks taxi meters. Varenukha (or at least what remains of the administrator) allows his extravagant impulses to get the better of him and causes the story to splinter apart. The Varenukha look-alike fabricates so many “weak links” in his account that Rimsky decides that it was “far too much, in fact.” More than demonstrating “a fright and a disgrace,” the tale merely gives its storyteller away. The Devil might make imposters or co-opt helpless mortals, but he cannot tell the truth.
The excesses of these hyperboles play out The Master and Margarita’s tension between fabulism and falsehood. Rimsky’s reaction to such tall tales gives a dose of reality in a novel that itself tends towards the amazing and impossible. Woland’s arrival in Moscow makes the city witness to all manner of absurdities—naked audience members on the street, raining money, vanishing administrators—that stretches and bends reality. In what seems like a light parody of Bulgakov’s own work, the strange imposter of Varenukha tests the limits of credulity.