The dead and the disappeared in The Master and Margarita

Have to say that Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" is getting pretty good - it reminds me a little of its near-contemporary (re date of publication) Confederacy of Dunces, in its over-the-top insanity and its bleak yet comical view of society - also of the very dry Man Without Qualities in its satire of a moribund society. As noted previously, novel gets under way when two literary gents encounter an incarnation of the devil (various called a professor, a consultant, and a foreign visitor) who tells them he was present during Jesus' life and then predicts the death of one of the men by beheading; when that death shortly and gruesomely comes to pass, the other fellow, a renowned Soviet poet named "Homeless," goes insane - or at least seems to - he wanders the streets of Moscow in his underwear, turns up at his literary club, where he friends tie him in napkins (!) to subdue him and bring him into a mental clinic. The more Homeless tries to explain his circumstances, the crazier he seems - though we "know" that he's sane - which in a sense means that if we believe the first chapters we're insane, too, right? All of this is pretty funny, but what makes the novel stranger and darker is the talk about people who have "disappeared" - could be just another bit of super-naturalism, but we're in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, and these disappearances are far more sinister - we know that the Soviet police are monitoring everything and everyone and ruthlessly suppressing any dissent. They'll tolerate a few drunken writers, as long as they'll praise the state once in a while, but not any real social commentary or questioning of authority. So The M & M is comic hi-jinx that masks a bitter social commentary - a literary mixed-genre that develops in many oppressive societies - even the S.U. - think of the few radical Soviet works published in the last days of the empire, like Aksymyov's (?) The Burn.