Korotkov Identity

Bulgakov’ Diaboliad details an increasingly outrageously comical tale regarding the absurdities Korotkov endures at the hands of the Soviet social and government system. Bulgakov utilizes the bumbling character of Korotkov to paint a satire of the Soviet political abuse of the common man. As Korotkov suffers constant abuses from the Soviet populace, his identity and self-worth is stripped from him and he is treated as a stranger to society. Thus, Diaboliad criticizes the ability for a government to establish one’ identity as a human being and satirizes the replaceability of human beings as cogs in the machine of society. At the story’s inception, Korotkov is described as a simple menial laborer content of his place in life. Korotkov “… worked

Underwarr and his twin occupy a main portion of the story’s conflict as their dual appearances plague and undermine Korotkov’s sanity, however, Kortokov’s own doppelganger Kolobkov plays a central role in erasing his own identity in the eyes of society. When Korotkov has his documents stolen, everyone starts to mistaken him for a Mister Kolobkov, a seemingly dastardly womanizer with very abrupt moral standards. An old man mistakenly accuses him saying “You want to snatch the last crumbs from the hands of an old man, Mister Kolobkov? Well then… Take them, eat up. Let an old man, a non-Party member, a sympathizer, die from hunger … Let him, you say. That’s where his road leads, the old mongrel” (Bulgakov 34). Without any documents to prove his identity, Korotkov is subject to whatever opinions and prejudices people have against him. Absent a job and documents, Korotkov exists only as people perceive him and despite all of his protests he is attributed an identity that is not his own. He is replaced by this Koblokov becoming a criminal and is further marginalized by society, which desires to dispose of him and his undesirability. Just as the Underwarrs serve as a doppelganger that emphasizes a uniform replaceable identity in mechanical Soviet society, Korotkov and Kolobkov represent a doppelganger set that emphasizes the absence of true identity for the everyman in Soviet