Margarita takes her devilish powers for a whirl in Chapter 21, when she lathers on Azazello’s cream, takes to the air, and enters a deeply personified world. Seeking vengeance for his slight towards the Master’s novel, she breaks into Latunsky’s flat and lays waste to the critic’s apartment:
Taking careful aim, she struck the piano keys, and the first pathetic howl spread through the apartment. The innocent parlor instrument screamed in a frenzy. Its keys dropped out, the ivory tops flew in all directions. The instrument howled, gurgled, rang.
The “innocent parlor instrument” stirs to life even as it gets dealt a deathly blow. It “scream[s] in a frenzy” and “howl[s]” as an invisible Margarita destroys its keys, a scene that puts the vivid force of Bulgakov’s imagination on display. Beyond articulating the instrument’s anguish, this instance of personification dovetails with a pun. Margarita’s “heavy hammer” takes up the idea of a piano’s hammer (the felt-tipped mechanism that strikes its strings when a key gets pressed) though, in this case, it screams rather than sings.
Howling pianos reinforce the novel’s overwhelming emphasis on fantasy, in which tomcats drink vodka and downstairs neighbors transmute into flying pigs. It erodes the distinctions between humans, animals, and objects, untethering the story from the demands of realism. As Margarita takes flight on a broom and recedes into invisibility, the pianos’ pained reaction reflects the transition from her previous, everyday life into the magically surreal conditions of her newly witch-like state.
In Chapter 21, Margarita passes Moscow’s threshold, dips into a river, and enters a kingdom whose magic makes the novel’s other events seem pale by comparison. Greeted by singing frogs and mermaids, the novel’s personification arranges a fitting ceremony for the queen of the underworld:
The transparent mermaids stopped their round of games over the river and waved to Margarita with water weeds. The greenish, deserted bank moaned with their greetings, echoing far and wide.
The riverbank’s personification is deceptively complex. Bulgakov invests the riverbank with human-like qualities as it “moans.” But even so, it seems only partly alive. The riverbank—being “deserted” itself—merely groans with the greetings offered by the transparent mermaids. It repeats echoes, unable to actually speak new words for itself. This works to strangely zombie-like effect—the personification appears to suspend the riverbank somewhere between life and an inanimate state. Half-alive, the riverbank is seemingly possessed by the transparent mermaids.
Placed within Woland’s sequence tricks, though, this uncanny sense of spiritual possession is in keeping with the novel’s magically surreal bent. The Devil summons a vampiric Varenukha, decapitates and reattaches Bengalsky’s head, and does the very same to Berlioz with a streetcar. Aloisy Mogarych wakes up clutching a house deed. Meeting Woland, the novel’s characters lose control over their own lives—a trend that holds for both people and, in this moment, riverbanks.