‘Nothing, nothing, nothing, my dears!’ she shouted, addressing no one knew whom. ‘The jacket and trousers are there, but inside the jacket there’s nothing!’
Bulgakov wrote these scenes about the same time when Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (1903-1942) were writing their novel The Golden Calf, which has a similar scene with an empty suit. The source for both may have been The History of a Town written by Mikhail Yefgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889). This book was published in 1869-1870 and it was a parody of Russian history, in the microcosm of a provincial town, whose very name - Глупов [Glupov] - is representative of its qualities, because Glupov means Sillytown.
The mayors of Glupov can be distinguished from each other only by the degree of their incompetence, but at the same time The History of a Town is an attack on the Russian people for their passivity toward their own fate.
~ from Jan Vanhellemont’s Masterandmargarita.eu on this chapter:
https://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/02themas/h17.html
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