Having lathered cream across her body, turned invisible, and taken to the skies, Margarita soars to the outskirts of the city and makes her landing along a riverbank. She receives a queen’s treatment at the end of Chapter 21, in a description including a simile:
Under the willow branches, hung with tender, fluffy tassels clearly visible in the moonlight, sat two rows of fat-jowled frogs. Blowing themselves up like rubber toys, they played a bravura march on wooden pipes.
Strung under willow branches and likened to “rubber toys,” the symphony of “fat-jowled” frogs provides an adorable flair to Margarita’s trip. The simile gives its amphibian subjects an endearing, cartoonish treatment as it sketches the frogs piping in concert. It marries the fantastical with the whimsical, too. The musical frogs—set against “a clump of spreading trees” along a “nocturnal river” beside “naked witches” and “transparent mermaids”—are part of a scene that mixes natural beauty and supernatural strangeness.
In a novel that takes inventory of Woland’s misdeeds, this moment of fun and fantasy seems almost vaguely reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It weakens the sinister connotations otherwise associated with the Devil by introducing a delightful world of strange surprises. Woland’s two-colored eyes, pince-nez wearing sidekick, and fanged accomplice might often seem unsettling. Here, though, Bulgakov proves that the infernal can be more than capable of offering its own charms.