Diaboliad and Other Stories

These stories are a bit madcap, and most of them have sly references to the infernal in them: characters saying “The devil only knows,” or a sulfurous smell, or a building burning down in an inferno. They cover everything from a clerk at a bureaucratic agency losing his mind over a series of clerical errors to a story about the lengths one man would go to avoid having his apartment requisitioned to house more people. These stories, especially Diaboliad and The Fatal Eggs, contain the seeds of the absurd and malevolent world of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.